


Afterlife

by applesofthemoon



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: F/M, Gen, PTSD, References to Torture, Theyne, bookverse, but c'mon you knew that already, longfic, references to rape, romantic Theyne eventually
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-14
Updated: 2017-07-02
Packaged: 2018-10-05 02:20:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 10
Words: 27,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10295339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/applesofthemoon/pseuds/applesofthemoon
Summary: Theon and Jeyne have escaped Ramsay’s clutches, eluded Stannis’s justice, and are on their way to safety in Braavos. Now the hard part begins.On hiatus for the time being--see author's note in Chapter 10





	1. Truth

**Author's Note:**

> Oh man, this one’s been a long time coming. There’s so much I feel I should say here, but it seems to me that the best authors let their work speak for itself, so I’m gonna give that a whirl.

**Theon**

He heard them murmuring to one another on the march across the frozen lake.

“It’s not right. He _saved_ me, you can’t let them put him to death.”

“ _Let_ them? I’m a prisoner here, don’t forget. I’ve no more say in the matter than he has.”

“But––”

“It’s a mercy anywise. You heard him, raving about gods and ghosts and stone kings. He’s mad.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“I will avenge my brother if it means killing the Bastard of Bolton barehanded, I promise you that. But vengeance is all I can give him now.”

They probably didn’t think he could hear them, but he did.

––

He fell face-first into the snow before the weirwood. With his hands bound behind him, he could not push himself up. He lay there, the snow soaking his clothes and numbing his face, until someone picked him up by his collar and laid his head on a fallen log, which he supposed was the nearest thing they had to a block.

The small party––northmen, king’s men, Asha and Jeyne––gathered round. They were silent but for Jeyne, who was weeping. Stannis drew his sword from its scabbard, and a strange shifting light fell across the snow. 

“Theon Greyjoy,” the king said, “for the murder of Brandon and Rickon Stark, I, Stannis of the house Baratheon, first of his name, King of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First Men, Lord of the Seven Kingdoms and Protector of the Realm, sentence you to die.”

Words, words, words. _Words are wind_ , Theon thought, although sometimes it was the other way around. He thought he could hear words in the wind now, as he had the last time he knelt before the heart tree of a godswood. Unlike the last time, he made no reply. He would give Asha no more reason to think him––to _remember_ him––mad. 

He closed his eyes and waited, shivering in the cold. But the blow did not come. Several moments passed, and still the blow did not come. What manner of game was the king playing? At this rate, Theon would freeze to death before Stannis could take his head. He raised his head to say as much and saw that every face in the clearing was upturned, mystified. He felt no wind, but _something_ was whistling through the bare branches of the trees. _Can they hear it too?_ he wondered.

 _Tell the truth,_ it whispered. _Theon. Tell the truth._

Oh yes, they heard. He could see it in the widening of their eyes. “I tried to,” he said in a sullen croak, like a child resisting a hated chore. “Before.” The washerwomen had not wished to hear his truth.

_Tell the truth now._

Who was he to refuse the gods? “I didn’t kill the Stark boys.”

Stannis slid the flat of his blade beneath Theon’s chin, lifting his head further off the fallen log. “What did you say?”

Theon moistened his mouth and repeated, louder this time, “I didn’t kill the Stark boys. I couldn’t find them.” He gave a little wheezing laugh, remembering. _It is better to be seen as cruel than foolish,_ he had told himself then. He had known nothing of cruelty. “The heads weren’t theirs. It was his idea, Ramsay’s, not mine. Only I didn’t know he was Ramsay. I didn’t know his name.”

“How convenient for you,” said one of the king’s men. “If you didn’t kill them, where are they? Answer me that, turncloak.”

Theon looked up at the weirwood and smiled. “Look there.”

Only Jeyne could have known whose face it was that gazed at them from the trunk of the great tree, as it had gazed at Theon in the godswood at Winterfell, but it made no matter. They had all seen it change.

The king’s men gasped and swore. The northmen muttered prayers. The shining sword moved grudgingly away from Theon’s throat. Jeyne wept and wept. And Theon laughed. _He’s getting back at me, the little shit,_ he knew. _He means to make me_ live.

––

The northmen could not allow the execution of a man pardoned by their gods, but the murder of the Stark boys was only one of Theon’s crimes, and the old gods had nothing to say as to the others. Thus it was decided he would go to the Wall, which suited him as well as anything. 

The way he saw it, it made no matter how he spent his life, because he wasn’t meant to be alive. He should have died in the sack of Winterfell, in the dungeon under the Dreadfort, leaping into the snow with Jeyne, under the weirwood in the crofters’ village, and on a dozen other occasions between now and the night he had sent his ironmen over the walls of Winterfell. It seemed to him that so many near-deaths ought to add up to one true death––that this was his afterlife.

Justin Massey's party and its human cargo left Stannis’s camp as his men readied themselves for battle. They put Theon on a horse with his hands still bound at his back and tied his horse to another. Asha did not come to see them off.

They rode all day and made camp only when it was too dark to see their route. Theon was sitting by the sad starveling fire, warming himself as best he could, when Jeyne came and sat beside him. Someone had given her a dry cloak and a scarf, which she had wrapped about her face in hopes of holding onto her nose. All Theon could see were her eyes, dark and deep, reflecting the fire’s light.

“Tell me true,” she said, her whisper muffled by the scarf. “Are you mad?” 

Theon remembered how Lord Bolton had answered that question when it came from Lady Dustin’s lips. “I may be. Does it matter?”

––

Jon Snow was not the same person who had departed Winterfell three years ago. He’d grown harder. Older. But it was well known that hard places made hard men, and people had a way of aging when time went by. That wasn’t even the half of it. _He smells of death,_ Theon thought, though not new death; it was not the smell of rot, but the smell of a crypt, the smell of bones long gone to dust. Theon could not have explained it had his life rested on it.

Jon received Theon, Jeyne, and Alysane Mormont, who would not be persuaded to leave her lady’s side, in his quarters behind the armory. Their welcome was not a warm one. Jon made only a perfunctory effort to hide his disappointment when he discovered that it was Jeyne, not Arya, for whom his rescue party had thrown down their lives. And if he was less than pleased to see _her_...

“My family’s home has been sacked, burned, and seized by the Boltons, no one has seen my little brothers in years, and because some starving, half-frozen men heard the wind blow in a godswood, I’m to make _him_ one of my men?” 

Jon’s direwolf, the white one––Theon could not remember its name––stood at his side, glowering. The beast was monstrous, its head level with Jon’s shoulder, but the look in its eyes could hardly have been more hateful than the gaze Jon cast his onetime foster brother.

“Not me,” Theon said. “I’m no one’s man.”

Jeyne sent him a sidelong glance. “Ser Justin rides for Eastwatch-by-the-Sea,” she said carefully to Jon. “He means to go to Braavos on King Stannis’s business, and if it please my lord, I would go with him. I could take Theon with me. We’ll be safe in Braavos, and he won’t trouble you again.”

“Stannis will not like it,” Jon said.

“Forgive me for saying so, my lord, my lady––” Jeyne dipped her head toward Lady Alysane “––but Stannis may already be dead.”

Theon’s eyes wandered to the thick yellow panes of the windows. There were guards posted outside, flanking the entrance to Jon’s quarters. Theon thought it passing strange that the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch should have need of a guard among his own men. “I have enemies closing in on either side of the Wall,” Jon said, “and treachery in the Watch. I will not pretend that what becomes of this turncloak is my most pressing concern. Still, it does not sit right with me to let him go unpunished.”

“ _Unpunished_?” Jeyne’s voice grew high and tight. “Have you _looked_ at him?”

Jon looked. The wolf looked too, its tail lashing silently. “If you would cross the Narrow Sea,” said Jon to Theon, “then cross it, and never return. At the very least, you sent my brothers into exile. You should taste your own tonic.”

 _I know it well,_ Theon thought of saying. _I’ve been in exile since I was ten years old._ "“Is that really within your power?” he said instead.

The lines in Jon’s brow deepened. “You have been put in my custody, so it is within my power to do as I please with you. It is also within my power to take your head.”

Theon grinned, giving Jon an eyeful of his broken teeth. “How is that when you speak in that lordly voice and look at me with those stern eyes, all I can see is the little boy who used to cry for his father when I thrashed him with a wooden sword?”

" _Theon!_ " Jeyne hissed, then turned to Jon, wringing her hands. “Please, Jon, he is cold and tired, he speaks without thinking.”

“We are all cold and tired,” Jon muttered. He rubbed a hand through his hair, then flung that same hand toward the door, saying, “Go now, while you can. Most of the castles between here and Eastwatch have been re-garrisoned; you’ll find shelter there, though they’ve barely enough food for themselves.”

Jeyne thanked Jon profusely, all but weeping as Lady Alysane escorted her back to the rest of their party. Her gratitude confused Theon. _Why should she care what he does with me?_ he wondered. “You have my thanks as well, Lord Commander,” he said once the women had gone, “and my word that I shall do my best to abide by your sentence. But should I freeze or starve before we make it out of Westeros, you’re welcome to take the head from my corpse.”

He gathered his cloak around him and limped toward the door. “Theon,” Jon said. “The party I sent, the spearwives and...the man they were with. What became of them, do you know? Are they dead?”

Theon could not keep a smirk from his face. Jon had the stench of a man a thousand years dead, but if he had to ask, he was still just a boy. “The lucky ones.”


	2. Dreams

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ser Justin's party braves the snow and the sea. Jeyne makes a nuisance of herself. Theon is kind of a jerk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Part of me wants to do song recs with each chapter and part of me really doesn't, but in any case [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uf_QhUZX3BM) is this story's namesake and thematically appropriate for pretty much every chapter. 
> 
> _Give me your cold hands, put 'em on my heart_

**Jeyne**

At Oakenshield, Jeyne spread her bedroll within four walls for the first time since Winterfell, but she did not sleep. The pain kept her awake. All night she writhed and sweated and bled, tainting the air with a foul, animal odor. 

When sleep came at last, in the small hours of the morning, it was no relief. She dreamt that she sat at Winterfell’s high table with a pink cloak round her shoulders, watching her wedding guests feast and drink and dance. She dreamt that Ramsay turned to her and gave her a silver chalice so large she had to hold it with both hands. He covered her hands with his own and smiled. _Drink,_ he bade her. _Drink and we will be as one forever, man and wife._

She lifted the chalice to her lips and drank. Blood filled her mouth, rich and salty. 

The bleeding stopped after a few days, as Lady Alysane had said it would. The dreams did not. 

**Theon**

Theon dreamt of riding through the wolfswood, a swift horse between his legs and a bow in his hands. From a distance, he saw Bran and Robb and the wildlings. He nocked an arrow, drew his bowstring, and loosed a shot at the man holding a dagger to Bran’s throat.

His horse whinnied and snorted as he reined up in the clearing. When he swung to the ground, he saw that it was not a wildling he had killed, but Bran and Robb. They lay sprawled on the forest floor, their eyes staring without seeing, their blood soaking into the dirt. Theon felt someone clap him on the shoulder. _Well done, Reek,_ Ramsay said, smiling his wet smile.

Theon struggled, lungs burning, to surface from the sea of sleep, and woke gasping on the floor of a cold, dark room. It took him a few moments to remember where he was. They were sheltering at Woodswatch-by-the-Pool, the second stronghold east of Castle Black. The room where Theon slept was cold because there was a big crack in one wall, admitting a wind so fierce it sliced straight through the heavy pelt wrapped around him. 

If he was to find neither warmth nor peace in sleep, he could not see why he should pursue it. He pushed off the pelt and went out into the corridor, where a lonely torch guttered in a sconce. He took it, blew gently to strengthen the flame, and set out to make the rounds of the castle.

The men of the garrison had given Ser Justin’s party a tower to itself. Ser Justin and his men had taken the rooms on the first floor, Jeyne and Lady Alysane a room on the second. Theon had been banished to the third floor, where his smell would be least offensive to the others. Clutching his cloak tightly around him, he picked his way down the winding staircase from the third floor to the second. There, the sconces were empty. In the dark, the corridor could have been a hundred leagues long.

A little ways down the corridor, a door slammed, and Theon froze. Quick, high, hiccuping breaths floated out of the darkness. Theon waited a moment, and, when it seemed that no threat was forthcoming, moved toward the sound.

In the torchlight he saw Jeyne, pale as a corpse, huddled against the door to the room she was sharing with Lady Alysane. Before Theon could ask what the trouble was, Jeyne flung herself at him, crying, “Oh gods, he’s come for me.” Her hands shook around fistfuls of his cloak. “I knew he would. He said he would find me, no matter where I went. He said he would make me sorry.”

Theon had no need to ask who ‘he’ was. “He hasn’t come for you,” he said, pulling the girl off of him so he could look her in the eyes. They were huge and glassy, like the eyes of a trapped animal awaiting the hunter’s knife. “He’s back at Winterfell, remember? We’re at the Wall, leagues and leagues from there. Be here.”

“But I _saw_ him, I saw––”

“You saw the past. It’s over. Be here now.”

Jeyne gasped for breath as if it were the first time she’d tasted air. Slowly, the tremors melted from her body. “I had a dream,” she whispered. “A terrible dream.”

“I know.”

She blinked away the tears teetering on her eyelids. “It must be the middle of the night. What are you doing here?”

“Walking. I couldn't sleep.”

“Oh.” Jeyne’s pupils grew as she looked beyond their halo of torchlight. “May I walk with you?”

The request startled Theon. He had walked by night for months now, and no one had ever walked with him. Why should anyone want to? “You should go back to bed,” he told her.

“As should you,” she said. 

“It's cold.”

Jeyne smiled. “I'll get my cloak.”

The She-Bear must have slept like her namesake, for neither their exchange by the door nor Jeyne’s fetching her cloak roused Lady Alysane from her bedroll. “No chatter,” Theon said as he started down the corridor, Jeyne a few paces behind him. “Come along if you must, I cannot stop you, but I won’t have you disturbing me.”

Jeyne followed him like a shadow all throughout the castle: up and down each flight of crumbling steps, to and fro across the frozen yard, through the kitchen and the armory and the great hall, the roof of which was in such poor repair that the tables were buried in snow. Aside from their footsteps, Jeyne’s gait a delicate counterpoint to Theon’s labored shuffle, the only sound was the sobbing of the wind. 

In the purple predawn, they stood gazing up at the Wall. _Now that,_ Theon thought, _would be a fine walk._ But the chain that pulled the winch cage was more rust than iron, and he misliked the way the switchback stair shivered and creaked in the wind. _What a bad jape that would be. Come all this way just to die trying to climb the Wall._

Theon’s eyes sought the top of the Wall, where a few of the ragtag garrison stood watch. Their torches flickered, distant as stars. “Why did you speak for me in Jon’s quarters?” He spoke to Jeyne, but did not turn to look at her. “What does it matter to you whether I do my penance on the Wall or in exile?”

From the corner of his eye, he saw Jeyne’s breath leave her lips in a swirling cloud. “You heard what Jon said as clearly as I. The men of the Watch are preparing for war. It may be with the Boltons, it may be with...something worse, but either way, the Wall is a dangerous place to be. You saved me, Theon. I could not leave you to die.”

 _But the plan was not mine. The choice was not mine. Abel’s washerwomen would have killed me there in the godswood had I refused to help them, and I jumped from the battlements to save my own skin as much as yours. I am not even half the man you believe me to be._ The stumps of Theon’s missing fingers itched inside his gloves. “Jeyne…”

“I thought you didn’t want to talk.” She smiled and turned to retrace her steps through the yard. After a moment, Theon followed.

He assumed that night would be enough to cure Jeyne of her curiosity about his nocturnal wanderings, but the next time they made camp at one of the Watch’s outposts, he was mildly horrified to find her waiting outside his door. “This will not serve,” he told her. “You need your sleep. You need your strength.”

“Surely no more than you need yours.”

“I’m––it’s different for me.” 

“How?”

He could not answer that, so she accompanied him again that night, and every night they passed in a castle on the Wall. Between castles Theon stayed in his tent, lest he roam too far from camp and lose himself in the snow, but they bedded down behind stone walls often enough that Jeyne began to nod off in her saddle. At one point, she nearly fell from her horse before Lady Alysane rode up and caught her. After that, the looks the She-Bear cast Theon became even more baleful than before, as if the girl’s madness were his fault.

Of course, it _was_ his fault. Everything was his fault.

He came to realize that short of tying Jeyne to her bedroll, the only way he could get her to sleep would be to do the same himself. At Greenguard, their last stop before Eastwatch, he came to her door before she could come to his. Her cheeks turned pink with pleasure at his proposal. “I know you wouldn’t try to fool me,” she said as he turned to leave her room, “but you’ll stay with us tonight, won’t you?”

Lady Alysane liked the idea no more than Theon did. “And how well do you expect we'll sleep with his stench in our nostrils?”

“It doesn't bother me,” Jeyne said, yawning widely. “You're welcome to go elsewhere, though.”

The She-Bear grumbled and groaned, but stayed, laying out her bedroll in a corner of the room as far from Theon and Jeyne as she could get. Within minutes, she was snoring. “I gave Lady Alysane my leave to return to King Stannis,” Jeyne said, “or Bear Island, or wherever she might wish to go. His Grace bade her escort Arya Stark, not me. But she insists on seeing us to Eastwatch.” She yawned again as she slid beneath the top layer of her bedroll. She had situated it rather too close to Theon’s for his comfort, and he hesitated to lie down beside her. “You said you would sleep if I did,” she reminded him.

“Well, I can hardly do that with you lying there...looking at me.”

“Very well.” Jeyne leaned over and blew out the flame swaying lazily in the lantern between their bedrolls. “Goodnight, Theon,” she whispered, her voice diffusing into the darkness with the smoke from the lantern.

It was not long before Theon heard sleep weight Jeyne’s breathing. He lay on his back with his hands folded on his belly, keeping company with the darkness. One might think Theon would fear darkness, but it had always treated him gently. He had never suffered anything worse than a few rat bites in the dark. Pain came by lantern and torch, hot and red as fire.

He dreamt he was a boy again, watching Pyke vanish into the mist from the deck of a ship. He ran to the stern shouting for his mother, his father, Dagmer, even Asha, anyone who would fetch him home and tell his brothers to stop their cruel japes. They were trying to scare him, they were always trying to scare him. His family would never give him away.

He was picked up by his collar and thrust out over the side of the ship, kicking uselessly above the seething sea. _You want to go home?_ It was Ramsay holding him, he saw. He smiled and jutted his chin at the distant towers of Pyke. _Go home. If you make it to shore alive, you can stay._

Theon woke in a spasm of terror, a cry for his mother still on his lips. He could see nothing, but he heard Jeyne shifting in her bedroll. “Be here,” she murmured. “Be here now.”

**Jeyne**

Jeyne dreamt of running through a moonlit meadow. In the dream she was a little girl, and Sansa was with her. Together they skipped and twirled amid the waving grass, laughing for no reason in particular.

There was a hill nearby and atop it sat the moon, round and white like an iced cake. Jeyne gathered her skirts and ran toward it. But when she reached the hilltop, she saw that it wasn’t a hill at all. It was a cliff, and below it there was water, flat dark water that reflected the moon. _There it is,_ Jeyne thought. _That’s where I have to go._

Before she could fling herself from the cliff’s edge, Sansa threw her arms around her waist, pulling her back. _Jeyne,_ she was saying. _Jeyne._

“Jeyne!”

The meadow evaporated, and Sansa with it. Jeyne was someplace she didn’t know, someplace where the floor rocked beneath her feet. She couldn’t steady herself; she fell against the body behind her. “Jeyne,” said a voice close to her ear.

 _No,_ she almost replied, _Arya._ Then she twisted free of the arms around her and turned to see Theon, his face a mask of dismay. “Gods be good, Jeyne,” he said, “you nearly went overboard.”

Jeyne blinked, drew a breath, and looked around her. They were on a ship, a trading galley, the _Surefooted Steed_ by name. She remembered boarding it yesterday at Eastwatch. She could see the coastline in the distance and the moon hovering in the sky, wreathed by wisps of cloud that reminded her of faded scars. She could see, too, how close they stood to the rail. Far below, waves lapped at the ship’s flank.

Her strength left her so suddenly that she would have gone to her knees had Theon not folded his arm through hers and held her up. She clung tightly to him as he led her belowdecks. When they arrived at her cabin, he peeled her off. “Will you stay with me?” she asked in a whisper. She could not see his face in the darkness of the narrow corridor, but she could feel him bristle. “Just for tonight.”

Theon stretched out on the empty bunk opposite Jeyne’s, where her bunkmate would have slept if she weren’t the only woman aboard. He too had a cabin to himself, she knew, because Ser Justin and his men could not stand the smell of him. She’d been set apart for propriety’s sake, he out of disgust, but regardless they had both been set apart, like carriers of some terrible illness. Sometimes Jeyne thought womanhood was the worst illness there was.

She sat up all the rest of the night, feeling the ship sway around her. A small lantern hung from a hook on the wall, but its flame had burned down to a red kernel, illuminating nothing beyond the lantern’s glass panes. The darkness in the cabin felt thick, like a heavy quilt pulled over Jeyne’s head. 

There was no window in the cabin, so morning announced itself not with the sunrise, but with the creak and thud of footsteps as the crewmen broke their fast abovedeck. Jeyne waited in the dark for Theon to wake. When he did, he felt for the lantern and breathed life into its flame, filling the room with shivering amber light. 

“You sleep better at sea,” Jeyne observed.

“I’m ironborn. We do most everything better at sea.”

“I wish I were ironborn,” Jeyne said, running her fingers over the stitching on her bedclothes. “Then I would be strong, like your sister.”

Theon snorted. “You couldn’t be less like my sister if you were a cream swan.” He pushed a hand through his hair, tugged uselessly at his rags, and made for the door. “Don’t you want breakfast?” he asked.

Jeyne imagined the crewmen jostling her with their hairy arms, raking her with their hungry eyes. It made her feel naked, wet and naked, like a newborn babe. “No,” she said.

When Theon had gone, Jeyne curled against the wall and lay her head on her shoulder. She thought about the dream that had led her to the ship’s rail. As a child she had been a terrible sleepwalker, given to roaming the halls of Winterfell in her nightdress. Her father would find her and carry her back to their quarters, and she sometimes rose the next morning with no memory of her wanderings. Other times, she woke in Father’s arms, crying from confusion. 

She froze at the creak of the door’s hinges, but it was only Theon, back with porridge and a skin of ale. “Eat,” he said, thrusting a bowl at Jeyne.

The porridge was cold and lumpy, but Jeyne ate it without complaint, every so often sneaking a glance at Theon. He ate too, a little bit. Mostly he drank, in noisy slurps that left ale dribbling down his chin. When he was through, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said, “Those washerwomen––or spearwives, or whatever they were––they didn’t die for you to do something stupid like starve yourself or jump over the rail.”

Jeyne stared at him. “Those washerwomen died for Arya Stark.”

Theon frowned. “Well, _Arya_ wouldn’t let their deaths go to waste.”

 _Arya would never have asked anyone to die for her,_ Jeyne thought. _Arya would have fought Lord Baelish’s men tooth and nail when they came for her. Arya would have made a rope of her bedclothes and climbed out the window of the brothel. Arya would have smuggled a knife into her marriage bed and cut Ramsay’s throat before he could touch her._

“I’m sorry,” she said. _And Arya wouldn’t say sorry._

**Theon**

Late one night, Theon stood at the rail of the _Surefooted Steed_ , watching moon-silvered waves move across the black water. The wind tossed his hair, pushing it back from his face. He remembered a time when he thought he would die before he felt the wind on his face again––and another time, not long past, when he thought he might die without a last taste of salty sea air. Now he wondered if he would live to return to the Iron Islands.

If he did, it would not be for awhile yet. First he had to survive Braavos. He would need to find work there if he was to eat, but what could he do? What was he good at? Archery, once, but he could hardly steady a bow with only three fingers on his left hand. He knew how to ride a horse and sail a longship, but what use were horses or longships in a city of winding streets and narrow canals? 

_I know how to obey,_ he thought, rubbing the stumps of his missing fingers to stop them itching. _Of all my skills, that’s like to help me most._

He turned from the rail and drew a sharp breath. Jeyne stood on the deck a few paces behind him, cloaked and ghostly in the moonlight. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

At least she wasn’t sleepwalking again. “I...had not thought to see you abovedeck.”

“Yes. Well.” Jeyne’s smile looked as if it pained her. “The air does get a bit stale down there.” She lowered the hood of her cloak, sweeping the shadows from her face. It was pale as bone, and so thin it made her eyes seem bigger than they should be, but the frostbite on her nose had receded. She would be pretty again, someday. “We must be nearing Braavos now, if the weather’s anything to go on. Winter is mild there, isn’t it?”

“So I’m told.” Theon tried to move past her, but she stopped him with a hand on his arm. 

“I wanted to thank you,” she said. “For the other night.”

He pulled away. “No need.”

“But––”

“Jeyne,” he said, “you must know that there is nothing between us.” The girl flinched as though she had been struck, and Theon smothered a twinge of guilt. Why should he feel obligated to smile and nod at everything Jeyne said? He had not asked her to attach herself to him. He owed her nothing. “We’re just two people who happened to be in the same place at the same time.” 

She looked away, lips quivering. “I suppose we are.”

The next day, while Theon sat on a barrel drinking from a skin of ale, Ser Justin approached him. Theon had little love and less respect for the young knight who led their party. He knew the game Ser Justin was playing, and he knew he would not win. Ser Justin still believed Jeyne to be Arya Stark and was duty-bound to see her to safety, but he had led Theon out of Westeros and paid his passage to Braavos because he hoped that King Stannis would reward him for his service with Asha’s hand. He was smart enough to surmise that leaving his bride's brother to die in the snow would be a sour note on which to begin their marriage. He was not smart enough to realize that even if he slew all the king's enemies singlehandedly, he would never have Asha to wife.

He seated himself on a barrel beside Theon. “Lady Arya is distraught,” he said. “I passed her cabin and heard her weeping.”

Theon took a swig from his ale skin. “Then perhaps you should stay away from her cabin.”

Ser Justin frowned. “The girl is fond of you,” he said. “I question her taste, but I cannot change it. Would it hurt you to show her some kindness?”

 _He understands me no better than he understands my sister,_ Theon thought. Keeping Jeyne at a distance was the kindest thing he could do for her.


	3. Clean

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In Braavos, Jeyne finds work for herself and Theon. Theon's demons come out to play.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to those of you who've left comments and kudos so far! <3 I don't always reply directly to comments, since I'm not a fan of the way it distorts the comment count (I love that ao3 allows you to reply to comments, I just wish it didn't count those replies as comments in themselves!), but never doubt that your feedback is noted and much appreciated.

**Theon**

The _Surefooted Steed_ docked in Braavos early one afternoon beneath an ice-blue sky. Ser Justin secured an inn for his party and went with Tycho Nestoris to the Iron Bank, leaving the others to pass the day as they would. Jeyne did not dare venture out into the city, but she did go downstairs to speak with the innkeep’s wife. She seemed friendly, Jeyne said, and perhaps she would point them toward work and lodging.

Theon stayed behind and sat in the window of their room, watching people pass along the narrow street on which the inn sat. His hopes of keeping Jeyne at arm’s length had met the same bitter end as most everything else he had hoped for. He seemed unable to chase the girl off for long, no matter how cold he was to her, and at this point he could not deny that he needed her. If she didn’t take him with her when she left the inn, he didn’t know where he would go. A pretty young girl could always make a bit of coin in the city, but a maimed, stinking wretch was another matter entirely. Theon would be lucky if he wasn’t thrown out of the almshouse.

Jeyne came back upstairs around sunset, in high spirits that seemed out of place in the stuffy, weakly-lit room. “Good news,” she said.

“Oh, good news, is it?” Theon said. “Peace has come to Westeros, and we sail for home? You’ll be an innocent maid again, and I a handsome prince?”

Jeyne did not appreciate his jape. “Your wit could curdle milk.”

“Funny, most people say it’s the smell.”

Jeyne sat down beside him. “The innkeep’s wife has a sister in service to a wealthy widow in need of help,” she said. “She’s just lost a bedmaid to a rich husband and a scullion to a bad back. If she likes us, she’ll hire us straightaway, and––”

“A scullion?” Had she really hoped he would let that slide by? “You’ve found me a job as a _scullion_? The Prince of the Iron Islands, scrubbing pots and shucking oysters for some old Braavosi cunt.” 

Even as he spoke, Theon knew what a fool he sounded. Anyone else wouldn’t have hesitated to point it out. _And what was your plan, o wise prince?_ Jeyne might have, perhaps should have, said. _Begging for your bread in the streets? Going home to throw yourself upon your uncle’s mercy? I’m sure Ramsay will take you back if you plead sweetly enough. Better you should lose every last one of your fingers than dirty them in a scullery._

But it wasn't in Jeyne’s nature to say such things, any more than it was in Theon’s nature to embrace servitude. “I know it's hard to swallow,” she said. “But it’ll mean a bed and a hot meal thrice a day, and we'll be able to save a little money for… whatever's next, whenever the time comes. And we'll be safe.” She reached out as if to take his hand in hers. He shrunk away, pretending not to see the hurt that glanced across her face. “You know as well as I do that's nothing we can afford to scoff at.”

Theon stared out the window at the street below. Men and women streamed by, talking, laughing, gesticulating with enthusiasm. As the deep blues and purples of dusk grew ever deeper, lanterns flickered to life outside doors and in windows. “Fine,” he said. “Fine. When do you mean to go?”

“In the morning,” said Jeyne with a breath of relief. “And we must needs make ourselves presentable before then.”

Theon’s skin tightened and itched. “Presentable?”

“Well, if we arrive looking like gutter rats, Lady Iolanthe’s like to sic the cat on us. I’ve found us some fresh clothes, and we’ll have to bathe––”

“And where do you see that happening? In a canal, with the contents of the city’s chamberpots? Or do you suppose Ser Justin wants into my sister’s smallclothes badly enough to send us to a bathhouse?” It made no matter to Theon. Naked in public was naked in public, whether amid clods of shit or clouds of steam, and if that was the price of a full belly and a roof over his head, he would die starving in the cold. 

Jeyne grimaced. “I don’t fancy the idea of strutting about in my name-day suit any more than you do, you know. The innkeep’s wife sold me an old wine barrel for a pittance, and she said we could use the kitchen tonight once everyone is asleep. We’ll have to haul and heat the water ourselves, but at least we’ll have some privacy.”

In the small hours of the morning, Theon and Jeyne crept down the stairs and into the inn’s kitchen. It took them the better part of an hour to fetch and warm enough water to fill the old wine barrel three-quarters to the top. After Jeyne had taken the first turn, with Theon standing watch outside the kitchen doors, they had to bail out the dirty water and fill the barrel all over again. Truth be told, Theon welcomed the work. It kept his mind off of what would happen on his turn.

Until it _was_ his turn. The rags of the clothes he had worn since Winterfell fell away as if they were relieved to be free of him. He struggled to climb into the barrel, finding that his leg shook as he tried to swing it over the side, and panicked briefly. _I can’t do it,_ he thought, _I can’t, I can’t, but I must, or Ramsay will punish me._ Then he heard Jeyne humming to herself in the corridor, and remembered that it was only her awaiting him, not Ramsay, and stopped shaking long enough to get into the barrel.

The water turned black almost the instant he stepped into it. Jeyne must have anticipated that, because she had left an extra pail of clean water within reach. Theon scooped some of it over his head and began to scrub himself fiercely with a chunk of lye soap, wanting to be dry and dressed as soon as possible. Privacy made bathing bearable, but he misliked it still. He found the water entirely too familiar, the way it touched him all over with its slippery fingers, reminding him of things he preferred not to be reminded of. 

Jeyne had lain out the clothes she’d scrounged up for him, a woolen tunic and breeches. They were simple clothes, servant’s clothes, but they were clean and crisp, such that the feel of them on his skin was almost jarring. “Much better,” Jeyne said when he called her in. “Doesn't it feel good to be clean?”

She lent him a comb to work the tangles out of his hair, which had become quite matted after months of hard weather and no washing. His beard was in an equally sorry state. “I suppose I could do with a shave,” he mused, though with no razor, no glass, and hands that were wont to tremble like an old woman’s at the slightest provocation, he didn’t know how he would go about it. 

“Suppose you could,” Jeyne agreed. “Would you like some help?”

He frowned at her. “You know how to shave?”

“I learned.”

“When? How?”

“I learned,” she said stiffly, lowering her eyes.

Understanding came as he thought back to a time when all he’d wanted from the world was a pair of pretty legs between which to warm his cock. Some of the girls he’d known back then had been bushy beneath their skirts, others wispy, others curly, but the only ones who had been shorn smooth were the whores. _The expensive ones, anywise,_ he thought as Jeyne lathered his chin and cheeks. He didn’t expect that would be any comfort to her. 

She produced a small dagger and honed it until it was sharp enough to shave a spider’s eyelashes. Theon watched her all the time, dimly aware of the faint buzz of misgiving in his chest. But it wasn’t until she lifted one hand to the back of his head, holding it steady, and the other to his cheek, the dagger flashing like a grin, that all the air was suddenly sucked up out of his lungs, and he knew nothing, felt nothing, but the need to _get away_ from the blade.

Time unraveled and for a handful of moments he was in the dungeon under the Dreadfort, driven mad with terror by the flash of a different blade. He fought, he wept, he pissed his breeches, but it did him no good. It never did him any good. It only served to amuse Ramsay. He stood there smiling and drank Theon’s pleas like sweet wine. _I’ll do anything, please. Anything. Anything. Anything._

“Theon,” Jeyne said. “Theon.”

A shudder rolled through him from head to heel. “Anything,” he gasped. 

“Hush, that’s all over. Be here now.” 

He was on the kitchen floor, he realized, and his tailbone was throbbing. He must have fallen, but he didn't remember falling. The taste of fear was on his tongue, and when he swallowed it dropped into his belly, making him queasy. “I'm sorry,” Jeyne said. She crouched in front of him, looking at him through solicitous brown eyes. “I should have known.”

He pitched forward and vomited onto the kitchen floor. 

Jeyne reached for a pail and had it in his lap so quickly that it was only the first wave that landed on the floor. He choked up the meager contents of his stomach and then some, spattering the pail with an acrid yellow bile. By the time he had finished, he was breathing in desperate heaves, and his eyes swam with tears. “I can’t,” he mumbled into the pail. “Please, my Iord, I’m sorry, my lord. I can’t. I can’t.”

Jeyne wet a rag and wiped his face clean. He misliked her touching him, but his eyes were playing tricks on him and every other blink turned her face into Ramsay’s, so he let her do as she would, even when she took his hands and curled them around a cup of water. “I know you don’t want to do this,” she said, “any more than I want to make you do it. But it must be done.” 

Theon brought the cup to his lips and filled his mouth with water, letting it absorb the sour aftertaste of vomit. He spat into the pail, then took another drink from the cup and rinsed his mouth again. His waking nightmare relaxed its grip on him by degrees, until at last he could look Jeyne in the eyes and feel reasonably sure that she was who she seemed to be. “Shall we try once more?” she asked. 

She helped him to his feet, propping him against the barrel that had served as their bathtub. This time, he closed his eyes. He felt Jeyne soaping his face, and a gentle tugging sensation as she trimmed the long scraggly hairs hanging from his chin. Then the dagger’s edge scraped carefully up his cheek. He stood stock-still, barely even breathing, but Jeyne drew no blood, and the past stayed in the past. 

In quick, light strokes, the blade moved down his neck, along his jawline, over his upper lip. At one point Jeyne began to hum as she worked. It was the same melody she’d been humming in the corridor. Theon did not know the song, but the rise and fall of Jeyne’s voice was soothing, like the slight sway of a boat in calm waters. 

“There we are,” she said, “all done.” He opened his eyes to see her smiling up at him. “Want to see?” she asked, offering him a mirror.

“Gods, no. Get that thing away from me before my face cracks the glass.”

By the time they had cleaned up in the kitchen and returned to their room upstairs, it was only an hour before dawn. Jeyne collapsed onto the bed and fell asleep immediately. Theon sat in the window, considering Jeyne's mirror. He had not seen his reflection clearly since he was whole. Not that he had no notion of how he looked; despite his best efforts, he had caught sight of himself in water, in a well-polished dish or a man’s steel breastplate, and others’ reactions to him told him at least as much if not more than those glimpses could. But he had yet to look himself square in the face for longer than an instant.

He had to admit it, if not to Jeyne then to himself: he felt a certain morbid curiosity. Thus he took Jeyne’s mirror and the lamp from her bedside and stole down into the alley behind the inn, where he could be sure Jeyne would not wake and flutter over to him, saying _see, it’s not nearly so bad as you thought._

He held the lamp aloft and peered into the mirror. There, in the severe shadows cast by the lamplight, he saw something that surprised him. Looking back at him was a fleshless, dark-eyed old man with stringy pale hair hanging round his face––but that wasn’t the surprise. The surprise was that he recognized that man.

He looked like his father had looked when last they’d met, less than a year before his death. Then he had looked on Theon with disdain. What would he think of him now? The notion made Theon cackle. Lord Balon was likely cursing him from beneath the waves, asking the Drowned God what he had done to deserve such a poor excuse for a son.

Theon laughed long and loud at that, until a voice rang through the misty predawn, telling him to shut up. The sensible thing would have been to look up and see the open window, the rumpled traveler or Braavosi fishwife scowling down at him. But Theon wasn't in a sensible state of mind. 

“Fuck you, you flaccid old eel,” he shouted back. “You were a shit father.” It felt good to say. “But you’re dead and I’m alive,” he added in a lower voice, “so I win.”


	4. Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> As Theon and Jeyne adjust to their new lives in Braavos, Theon falls mysteriously ill.

**Jeyne**

Lady Iolanthe’s estate occupied a small islet southeast of the city, accessible by means of a mossy stone bridge. Plant life was scarce on the islet, and what little there was had been stripped bare by winter. Amid the brittle grass and sprinkling of trees stood a manse, all crumbling brick and peeling paint, with a single tower jutting from its western end. Looking up at it, Jeyne told herself, _We’re home._

The thought had an odd taste to it, like a cake baked with salt instead of sugar. Jeyne remembered arriving in King’s Landing some three years past, how she had gazed in awe at the proud towers of the Red Keep. _Can you believe that’s going to be our home?_ she breathed to Sansa as they rode through the Dragon Gate.

Sansa smiled. She did not smile often during the latter part of their southward journey, after that awful business with Lady at Darry, but she smiled then. _What do you mean, going to be?_ she said. _It_ is _our home._

Jeyne smiled back. _We’re home!_ she sang out, making Sansa laugh. _We’re home, we're home!_ they cried together, bouncing up and down in their saddles, until Septa Mordane rode up to scold them for raising their voices in public.

Lady Iolanthe was a thin, moist-eyed old woman who stared out the window of her solar while Jeyne recited the story she and Theon had agreed upon. They were brother and sister, she said, raised as servants to a noble house in the Riverlands, which accounted nicely for their refined speech and manners as well as their Westerosi accents. Shortly after the war began, soldiers had taken their home, killed their mother, maimed Theon, and defiled Jeyne. They had seized their first chance to escape and flee to Braavos.

It wasn’t the truth, but it wasn’t the greatest lie Jeyne had ever told. Theon was maimed. She was defiled. They had fled to Braavos. Did the hows and whys really matter?

They were hired then and there with a wave of Lady Iolanthe’s hand. A senior bedmaid, Hatha, showed them to an empty room in the servants’ wing. In the room there was a chest of drawers, a four-poster bed, and a straw-stuffed pallet. A single window overlooked a bare-limbed honey locust tree. _We’re home,_ Jeyne thought.

They were fed, broth and brown bread, and then the work began. Hatha, a sturdy woman of perhaps five-and-thirty, took Jeyne upstairs to Lady Iolanthe’s bedchamber. It was large, airy room situated on the highest floor of the tower, with twin banks of tall, narrow windows facing the lagoon and the city. Jeyne and Hatha made the bed and changed the rushes and dusted the furniture, all the standard bedmaids’ work. It went smoothly, and Hatha was decent company for someone who spoke little of the Common Tongue.

Before they left to take Lady Iolanthe’s soiled silks and wools down to the laundry, Jeyne stood for a moment at the windows overlooking the city. The morning’s mist had lifted, and in the clear midday Jeyne could see the buildings all crowded together like beggars lined up outside an almshouse. She could see fingers of chimney smoke grasping at the sky, and in the distance the spires of temples, the names of which she did not yet know. _We’re home,_ she thought.

She spent the afternoon attending Hatha as Hatha attended to Lady Iolanthe, bringing her tea, helping her from her solar to the privy, rubbing her wrinkled hands with sweet-smelling oil. At day’s end, Jeyne took her evening meal in the kitchen with the rest of the household. The servants and their children together were a boisterous bunch, and there were men among them, of course. Their laughter alone made Jeyne’s skin crawl, but she knew there was nothing for it. These people were her people now, men and women both. _We’re home,_ she thought.

In the middle of the table lay a blackened fish half as long as Jeyne was tall, with glassy eyes that reflected the diners in miniature. The look of it turned Jeyne’s stomach, so she ate only bread, tucking some away to bring up to Theon. She had not expected him to want to make friends with the other servants just yet, but she wished he had come to supper all the same.

She went up to their room to find him passed out on the pallet with an empty cup in one hand, smelling as though he had bathed in wine. Jeyne sat on the edge of the bed––her bed, she supposed––and looked down at him. 

“We’re home,” she said aloud, wanting to give shape to the thought, to make it real. But it was like speaking into the wind: she couldn’t hear herself at all. 

**Theon**

Theon’s days in Lady Iolanthe’s service did not seem to pass so much as fade one into the other, each much like the last. Most of his time was spent in the kitchen. Otherwise, he ate what he had to, slept as he was able, and drank as much as his belly could hold. 

Survival instinct had driven him from the walls of Winterfell and through the snow to Stannis’s camp, along the Wall and across the Narrow Sea, and now, in relative safety, he felt aimless and ill-humored. Where fear had died, bitterness took root. He resented his work as a scullion. He resented sleeping on a pallet in the corner of a small spare room. He resented being here, in hiding, while war raged in Westeros. He forgot––he allowed himself to forget––that he would once have wept with gratitude for the gifts of this life.

Wine helped. Wine helped a great many things: his headaches, and the pain in his teeth and...certain other places. Some nights, if he drank enough, he could even sleep without dreaming. Working in the kitchen made it easy for him to fill a cup whenever he pleased, and he took to spending his evenings sitting in the window of his and Jeyne’s room, drinking and staring out at the lagoon.

Jeyne took a dim view of this pastime, and did not hesitate to make it known. “I wish you wouldn’t drink so much,” she told him on one occasion, returning from supper. She took her meals in the kitchen with the other servants and always brought Theon something soft to eat, even though more often than not he took a sniff of it and brought his cup to his lips again. 

“It helps,” he said.

“How so?”

“It makes me happy.” He drew back his lips in a gruesome smile. “Don’t you want me to be happy?”

Usually such a smile made its recipient shudder and turn away, but Jeyne only gave him a withering look. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

She didn't answer that. Instead, she went to the basin that sat atop the chest of drawers and splashed water on her face. She pulled off her dress and blouse, huddled in the corner so Theon could see only her thin white back, the ridge of her spine traversing her lacy cape of scars, and changed into her nightdress. “You do recall I've already seen you naked,” Theon muttered into the rim of his cup.

It was for the best that Jeyne did not hear him. “What have you heard about the House of the Red Hands?” she asked as she combed out her hair.

“The what?”

“The House of the Red Hands,” she repeated. “They’re healers for hire. Hatha brought her little boy there when he took ill last week.” Jeyne paused a moment, then added, “I thought you might wish to see a healer about your teeth. They could pull the broken ones, so it wouldn’t hurt you to eat.”

The notion made Theon’s hackles rise. “No one is going to touch my teeth.”

“They would give you milk of the poppy and do it while you slept. You wouldn’t feel a thing.”

Theon sucked down another mouthful of wine. “Yes,” he sneered, “because the idea of a stranger plucking out bits of me while I’m asleep is so appealing.”

Jeyne made a final attempt at conciliation. “I would come with you, if you liked.”

“Just what I need to make me less pathetic––a little girl holding my hand.”

Thus went most of their conversations throughout their first few weeks in Lady Iolanthe’s service. Theon was surly and spiteful, Jeyne as patient as anyone could be, though nary a day passed without her fretting about his drinking. “You know,” she said once, in a voice so gentle he knew from the first word that whatever followed would be intolerable, “if you’re in pain, there are better ways to ease it.”

He barely restrained himself from spitting at her. “You’re not trying to send me to a healer again, are you? One would think you’re taking a cut of their fees.”

Truth be told, he was in pain, pain beyond that to which he had grown accustomed. But it wasn’t the sort of pain he could speak of to anyone, least of all Jeyne, so he drank and drank until he could feel nothing at all. Many a morning began with Jeyne shaking him awake, telling him to get up and wash the vomit from his face before someone from the kitchens came looking for him.

On one such morning, he did not heed her urging, and she left the room muttering her intent to dash the wine from his hands the next time she saw him with it. The wine wasn’t what kept him abed, though. The pain burned so fiercely in him that he could not stand. It was as though someone had sliced open his belly and filled it with hot coals. Once Jeyne had gone, he threw off his quilt and curled against the brick wall, hoping it would cool him. 

“Theon?” When Jeyne woke him, he did not open his eyes, but he could see through their lids that the light in the room was lamplight, not sunlight. He must have slept all day. “Theon?” She touched his brow and drew in her breath sharply. “Gods, you’re hotter than dragonfire,” she whispered, her voice tight. “I’m going to get help. Wait here, all right? Just wait here.”

The ghost of a laugh fluttered out through Theon’s nose. _Where does she imagine I’ll go?_

**Jeyne**

Jeyne sat in the corridor outside the room she shared with Theon, her back pressed to the wall and her knees touching her nose. Her skirt was wet through with tears, but she was trying to keep quiet, both for the sake of the servants behind the other doors and in hopes of hearing something through her own. The last she’d seen of the healer had been more than an hour ago, when he’d poked his head out to ask for hot water. _And a clean rag or two,_ he’d added. _More, if you can spare them._

It had been late when Jeyne ran through the city to the House of the Red Hands, and now it was later still. Hatha and her boys had retired to their room some time ago. Hatha had offered Jeyne a blanket and a place on their floor, but Jeyne knew she would not sleep even if she lay down and shut her eyes. 

Theon had been so hot to the touch, his breathing a dry rattle. Jeyne wished she hadn’t been short with him about his drinking. _Perhaps if I had been more patient,_ she thought, _if I had tried harder to understand…_. She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. 

She thought of her father, how they’d quarreled before he was killed in King’s Landing. Jeyne had envied Sansa her prince and wanted Father to make a match for her too, preferably with one of the gallant southron knights from the Hand’s tourney. Marriage had seemed so exciting then, and Jeyne was so bored of being a child. 

_Perhaps in a few years,_ Father said. _In a few years all the good knights will be taken!_ Jeyne wailed. _I’ll be an old maid! You can’t_ do _this to me!_

She had never seen his body, but she felt certain he was dead. He was dead, and his bones had likely come to rest in the jaws of King Joffrey’s dogs. He was dead, and the last words she’d spoken to him were _you can’t do this to me!_

Suddenly the door opened, and Jeyne scrambled to her feet. “Come in, if you like,” said the healer, a hawkish man in a red-and-white striped robe. He had a thick Braavosi accent, but spoke the Common Tongue fluently. “It’s not catching.”

He volunteered nothing further, and Jeyne made no inquiries. It didn't matter to her what was wrong with Theon, as long as it could be made right again.

The room was warm, and it grew warmer the nearer Jeyne drew to the bed. In it, Theon lay drenched in sweat beneath a single sheet. The muscles of his face were locked in a grimace that hurt to behold. “He looks like he’s in pain,” Jeyne said.

“He is in pain,” said the healer. “If he weren’t in pain, he would be dead.”

He was cleaning his instruments in the pail of water Jeyne had brought him. From the corner of her eye Jeyne caught a glimpse of a knife, a small delicate knife dyed red from tip to hilt, and shivered despite the warmth of the room. “But he’s not going to die.” She swallowed. “Is he?”

“He may. He may not.” The healer swirled the bloody knife through the water and tapped it a few times against the pail. “I’ve done all I can do. Now we wait for the fever to break.”

When the healer told her his fee, Jeyne’s heart sank. She took out the tea tin in which she and Theon had been saving their wages. The coins clattered as she dumped them out on the chest of drawers. “I know it’s not much,” she said, “but it’s all I have.” She thought wistfully of the Winterfell of her girlhood, where she had taken Maester Luwin for granted.

“It will do,” the healer said, “for now.” He swept the coins into a pouch. “I’ll take the rest as you have it.”

Jeyne nodded. “Thank you…” He had told her his name at the House of the Red Hands, but she could not remember it.

“Fazian,” he supplied.

“Fazian.”

He packed up his things, save a flask of milk of the poppy, and went to the door. “I will return tomorrow to check his progress and change his bandages,” he said on his way out. “If he wakes you may give him the milk of the poppy, but he will not wake.”

Only once he had gone did it occur to Jeyne that she had been alone with a man other than Theon for the first time in months. The heat of her fear for him had burned away all her fear for herself.

She opened the shutters and sighed her relief as the cold outside lightened the heavy air in the room. Theon did not seem to feel it. He did not seem to feel anything but pain, and Jeyne could do nothing to ease it. She knelt beside the bed, thinking of the lie she had told at the House of the Red Hands. _It’s my brother,_ she’d said, _he’s desperately ill._ She could not remember the healer’s name––even now it was fading from her mind, laughably unimportant––but she had remembered to lie.

Perhaps it was because the lie was easier than the truth. What _was_ the truth, really? What was Theon to her? _He saved me,_ she thought. But that was what he had _done_ , not what he _was_ , and it grew longer and longer past with each day. _He’s my friend._ But would he call her _friend_ , a weepy slip of a girl who wouldn’t even let him have a drink in peace? Perhaps it was as he had said at sea. Perhaps they were just two people who had happened to be in the same place at the same time.

_I know he’s not much, but he’s all I have._

Jeyne reached up and touched the hot, papery flesh of Theon’s cheek. He misliked being touched, she knew, but she didn’t see as it could do him any harm. “I know you would not care to hear it,” she said to him in a whisper, “but the world wants you in it, Theon. The gods themselves spoke for you, under the weirwood in the crofters’ village. You weren’t meant to die here, like this.”

Theon made no reply but the faint hiss of air through his nostrils. Jeyne’s eyes welled with tears. “You promised you wouldn’t leave me.”

She slept sitting up, her head propped against the mattress. Every hour or so she woke, and listened. Only when she heard Theon breathing did she let sleep reclaim her.


	5. Remains

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Theon's fever breaks, Fazian delivers some unwelcome news, and Jeyne plays woods witch.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you again for your kudos and comments! I was going to ramble a bit here about various authorial choices made in this chapter, but it ended up just feeling like clutter, so I gave it the snippy-snip.

**Theon**

Fever dreams were, quite fittingly, hot. One in particular recurred with cruel frequency. In it Theon was being roasted on a spit over a roaring fire. The skewer pierced him between the legs and emerged from his throat, turning his insides into a sea of boiling blood, but it didn’t kill him. He lived to feel the flames first tasting, then devouring him. He felt his skin curl and crisp. He smelled his flesh cooking and his hair burning.

Then there were his old friends, the dreams he had all the time––dreams of wolves and weirwoods, of sobbing women and barking dogs, the wide eyes of frightened children, a hooked knife winking conspiratorially in torchlight. Only now when he whirled and ran, he was running barefoot on hot coals, making him jump and stumble and eventually fall through the floor, not into consciousness, but another dream, always another dream, with a host of fresh horrors slavering at the smell of him.

When at last he woke, it was to a terrible pain in the place where the spit had entered him in the roasting dream. He was lying amid sweat-damp bedclothes in a dark room. A soft moan plucked at the strings in his throat, rising and falling without ceasing.

A woman sat on the bed. “Shh,” she said, resting a cool hand on Theon’s forehead. “Shh.”

It occurred to him that he wasn’t sure where or when he was. Maybe this woman was his mother. Maybe he was back home again, a child, and he had taken a chill after one of his brothers had picked him up and thrown him into the sea in all his clothes.

It occurred to Theon that he had done something wrong. He couldn’t remember what, but he remembered that it was very, very wrong, and Mother would be disappointed in him. “I’m sorry,” he croaked.

“Shh,” the woman said again. She helped Theon drink something thick and chalky from a tin cup, and sat there stroking his hair until he slid back into sleep.

He dreamt that he was back in his old cell under the Dreadfort, hearing footsteps in the hall. When they reached him, he knew, something bad would happen, something worse than everything else combined. But his door never opened. The footsteps just went on and on, for what seemed like hours, and all the time Theon cowered in a corner of the cell, his fear throbbing like an organ unto itself. The fear was always the worst part. Pain was only in your body; fear lived in the very core of your being.

He woke, the footsteps still drumming in his head, to a man peeling back his bedclothes and washing him all over with a wet cloth. _Stop,_ Theon tried to say, _leave me,_ but he couldn’t manage more than a grunt. The man gave him more of the chalky drink, and again he slept.

He dreamt a dream older than the rest, in which he knelt with his head on a block. He was in the yard at Winterfell, with the Starks and their household standing round. Lord Balon had threatened the king’s peace and Theon was to pay the price, there in the yard where he had trained at arms with Robb and Jon. He had come willingly. He did not beg; he did not cry. He was a Greyjoy, and he would die with dignity.

Now Robb stood over him, unsheathing Lord Eddard’s greatsword. Robb did not speak to Theon, would not even look at him, but as he hefted Ice into the air Lord Eddard said, _I’m sorry, Theon._

It was that, more than anything, that sent tears cutting down Theon’s cheeks.

The next time he woke, his fever had broken. He was lucid enough to know the bed where he lay as the bed in his and Jeyne’s room, the bed she slept in. He did not recognize the man who came to look in on him. He was a tall, thin man, with a hooked nose and a cap of short dark hair, and he wore a costume of red and white. “Water,” Theon said, his voice a sleep-thickened rasp.

The man offered him a cup, and he pushed himself up on one elbow to take it. He emptied half the cup in a swallow and poured the rest of the water over his head, washing away the film of dried sweat that clung to his face. “Who are you?” he asked. “What happened to me?” 

“I am called Fazian,” said the man in a heavy Braavosi accent. “And you have been very ill.”

“Have I?” Theon would have laughed had there been air enough in his lungs. “How long?”

“Four days. I feared the worst when your sister brought me to you, but you’re on the right side of it now.” A healer, then. Where had Jeyne said one would go to hire a healer? Some house or other, Theon could not recall the name. “Your stitches had been left in far too long. They became buried in your skin and poisoned your blood.”

It took Theon several moments to realize what that meant. When he did, he wished it had taken him longer––a year, perhaps two. 

_Stitches._ The word filled his head the way a sour taste would fill his mouth. Ramsay never squandered his maester’s attentions on his playthings. If ever a wound was bad enough that it needed seeing to, he would foist the job off on one of his Bastard’s Boys, whoever was least in his good graces at the time, and leave him to stave off death however he could. For fingers and toes, a hot iron would usually suffice to stop the bleeding. Theon had only needed stitches on one occasion.

The task had fallen to Sour Alyn, who had grabbed him by the leg and hissed, _Don’t you think of dying on me. Don’t even think of it. Elsewise I’ll be kissing my skin farewell. Lord Ramsay’s got plans for you, see. Big plans._ He hawked and spat. _You’re not even a man and you’re worth more than I am. Goes to show what loyalty gets you round here._

Theon squeezed his eyes shut so tightly it hurt, trying to banish the memory before it overcame him. “My stitches…”

“Yes, the ones––”

“ _I know which ones._ What did you do to me?”

“I cut away the rotten flesh, cleaned the wound, and put in new stitches, a deal neater than the old ones. You’ll be some time in healing, but once you do you should find yourself much more comfortable.”

 _Comfortable_. How lovely to hear that if he had to lie here helpless as a newborn babe before a man who knew his most hideous secret, at least at some point in the future he would be _comfortable._ Fury, which he supposed was better than shame, twisted in his gut. “Don’t touch me,” he barked when Fazian approached the bed. 

The healer blinked at him. “Your dressing must be changed.”

“I'll do it myself.”

“Are you strong enough?”

“Strong enough to strangle you if you come a step closer.”

Theon doubted the truth of that. He didn't feel strong enough to wring out a wet cloth, let alone wring a man’s neck. But his belly was a series of knots the likes of which a seasoned sailor would envy, and he knew that if Fazian put his hands on him, he would be sick. And sickness would be the best of it. He did not trust himself not to slip into the madness of memory, not to disgrace himself further shaking and blubbering and begging the healer not to hurt him.

“I will leave you to it, then.” Fazian did not seem any more convinced of Theon’s strength than Theon was, but thankfully he did not press the issue. “If you need anything, you may send for me,” he said, and took his leave.

Alone again, Theon lay his head back down. It was heavier than all the brick in the manse’s walls, and full of half-formed wisps of thought chasing each other in circles. What Fazian had seen and touched was a place where something _wasn’t,_ not a place where anything _was._ There was no name for it. There was a name for what Ramsay had done to him, there was a name for what he was now, but there was no name for what remained, and that which had no name was nothing. _How can you see nothing?_ he wondered. _How can you touch nothing?_

He stared at the ceiling until his eyelids ached to close, then let his dreams drag him back down into the brackish water of sleep.

–

Some time later––that evening or perhaps the next day, with the shutters closed Theon could not be sure––the door creaked open and Jeyne’s soft footsteps crossed the room. Theon did not turn to look at her, but he felt her weight, slight as it was, depress the corner of the bed. “I’m told you gave Fazian some trouble,” she said.

“I don’t need his help.”

“He saved your life, Theon.”

“I never asked him to.” 

She had left the door open a crack; he could tell from the sudden draught of fresh air. It made him realize how stuffy the room was, the air thick with the smells of his flesh and sweat and the healer’s medicines. It was a sickroom. He was an invalid, lying here receiving visitors abed. 

“There’s milk of the poppy,” Jeyne said. “For the pain.”

“No pain,” Theon lied.

She sat there a few moments in silence. Then she rose and left the room.

Jeyne must have been sharing quarters with another bedmaid for the time being, for she did not return. Theon slept again and dreamt of hanging upside down from a meat hook in a butcher’s shop, bleeding from a wound between his thighs. There were rivers of blood, oceans, more than there should have been in a thousand bodies. It ran warm and salty down his belly and chest, over his face, into his mouth and hair and eyes.

Fingers of daylight were probing through the slit between the shutters when Fazian returned with a bowl of steaming porridge. “Funny,” Theon said, “you don't look like a serving wench.”

“I am no wench,” Fazian said, “but I am a healer.” He stacked a few pillows behind Theon and helped him sit up. “If you do not eat, you will not heal.”

The porridge was thick and sweetened with milk and honey, and Theon did not need to be persuaded to eat it. It wasn't saying much, given how weak he had been, but when he had finished he felt easily three times stronger than he had when he begun. Fazian took the empty bowl and pushed a cup of hot tea into Theon’s hands, promising that it would make him stronger still. The smell, he thought, was certainly strong enough; it was so bitter he nearly gagged before he could get the cup to his mouth.

He forced down few sips and stopped to let them settle in his belly. “Does she know?” he asked, the steam from the tea fogging his face.

Fazian did not ask who _she_ was or what Theon feared her knowing. He only shook his head. “Not from my lips.” 

Theon let out his breath. For all he had tried to push Jeyne away, he knew in that moment how little he truly wanted to succeed. She was so kind to him, so stubbornly, stupidly kind to him, even as he was so stubbornly, stupidly unkind to her, but if she knew how ruined he really was... 

“I have served at the House of the Red Hands many a year,” Fazian said, “and in that time I’ve become secret-keeper to all of Braavos. Your secret is not the least of them, but neither is it the worst. You must know that I would never betray your trust.”

Theon frowned. “Who said I trusted you?”

Fazian regarded him frankly. “I do not see as you have much choice.”

It was not as though Theon had never asked himself what it mattered. If no man alive knew all that had happened to him, would it unhappen? And if everyone knew, if he were paraded naked down every road and quay in the Iron Islands, could it possibly hurt him more than he’d already been hurt?

They were thoughts, no more. If he ever felt the truth of them, it would not be for years. He finished his tea and beckoned Fazian to his bedside. “Come, help me up so I can use the chamberpot. I’d sooner not lie here pissing myself like an old drunk. Then you can show me how to change the thrice-damned dressing.”

––

Theon sat in bed staring out the open window, the wind’s wet tongue licking at his face and hair. No rain was falling, but the air outside was heavy and damp. Thick clouds of fog bunched over the lagoon, obscuring the far shore. It was the sort of weather that reminded Theon of home.

Along the edge of the islet wandered a pair of children, some servant’s whelps. One of them bent, picked up a small stone, and skipped it along the water’s surface. Theon had been good at skipping stones once. He remembered standing on the bank of a pond in the wolfswood with Robb, trying to teach him to spin a stone off his forefinger.

They had been small then, little boys who saw the world through narrow windows. They had played at lords in the wood and yard with nary a thought to what would happen when they grew older and it was no longer a game. Robb would have been Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North, had everything gone to plan, and Theon would have been...what? Put on a horse with his bow and arrows and sent off down the kingsroad with no more than a farewell? Held hostage indefinitely, hunting in the wolfswood and fucking girls from the winter town while Robb married and had children and Asha ruled the Iron Islands? 

Either would have been infinitely better than this. _Scrubbing pots and shucking oysters would be better than this,_ he thought. “If I have to spend another day in this bed,” he announced, “I shall throw myself from the window.”

“Best not,” said Jeyne from the pallet in the corner. She looked up from her sewing and smiled. “Knowing you, you’d survive it, and the gods only know how long it would take you to heal from that.”

Theon groaned and let his head fall against the wall behind the bed. Fazian had insisted that he would heal best if he moved about as little as possible, and Jeyne insisted that he obey Fazian. That was all well and good for them, but they weren’t the ones who had to lie abed all day with nothing to look forward to but getting up to use the chamberpot. 

“Here,” Jeyne said, rising and bringing her sewing to Theon’s bedside, “if you’re so bored, you can help me. Hatha’s given me a basketful of her old dresses, but she’s taller than I am, so they need hemming.”

Theon sniffed. “That’s women’s work.”

“Work is work. Would you like to work, or would you rather sit there sighing like a lovelorn maiden?” 

Theon frowned, but moved aside to let Jeyne sit with him at the head of the bed. She spread the skirt of a dress out on the quilt and showed him how to poke the needle into the cloth and pull the thread through, securing the folded edge of the skirt. Theon warned her that his stitching was not like to be the neatest, but she said she didn’t mind; she doubted Lady Iolanthe was looking closely at the hems of her bedmaids’ dresses.

Outside, the wind shook the branches of the honey locust, and seabirds cried in the fog. Inside, Theon and Jeyne worked in companionable silence. Theon found the repetitive motions of sewing unexpectedly relaxing. His hands were not as deft as they had once been––he hadn’t even been able to thread his needle without Jeyne’s help––but they could coax a needle through cloth.

He did not think about Fazian doing much the same thing to him while he lay wrapped in poppy-sleep in this very bed. He did not imagine his needle piercing flesh instead of cloth, closing a wound with quick, sharp tugs. At least, he tried not to. He tried so hard that his hands began to shake, and when he took Jeyne’s little sewing shears to snip a thread at its end, he dropped them amid the bedclothes.

He muttered a curse and felt for the shears, but found the blades first. Lifting his hand from the bedclothes, he saw blood beading along a cut on his palm. Jeyne made a distressed noise and reached for his hand. “Let me see.”

He brought his hand to his mouth and sucked at the cut, tasting the salty sweetness of blood. “It’s nothing.”

“It looks deep. If I could just––”

When she reached for him again, he jerked away. “I said don’t.” His heart was pounding and it made him self-conscious, as if Jeyne could see it through his clothes and skin. She stared at him, her hand half-outstretched, a crease in her brow. 

“I’m not going to hurt you,” she said softly.

“I know,” he said, only half-lying. Of course he knew, in his head. The trouble lay in getting the rest of him to believe it. 

“Oh! I’ve got just the thing.” Jeyne hopped off of the bed and rummaged through the chest of drawers, coming up with a rag, a linen bandage, and a small glass bottle three-quarters full of clear liquid. “Here we are,” she said, giving the bottle’s contents a swirl. “Witch hazel, it’s called. It’ll stop the bleeding and help you heal without scarring.”

She climbed back up next to Theon and sat there with her treasures, waiting. He looked down at his hand, bloodied and stinging. He could say no, he knew. He could say no and no harm would come to him; Jeyne would not punish him. But perhaps disappointing her would be punishment enough.

He moistened his mouth and extended his hand, palm up. Jeyne wet the rag in the bottle, cupped his hand in her own, and dabbed the rag carefully along his cut. The witch hazel was cool, like steel. But it wasn’t steel, he had to remember that. He wasn’t chained to a wall with a hooked blade sliding beneath the skin of his little finger, separating flesh from muscle. He was sitting amid rumpled bedclothes with the sea breeze sighing in his ears and Jeyne perched on the bed beside him, her breath smelling of the honey in her morning porridge. Jeyne, not Skinner, not Ramsay. _Jeyne,_ he told himself, _it rhymes with rain._

“What?” Jeyne asked.

Her voice pulled Theon out of his head and he drew a sudden deep breath, realizing as he did that he had ceased to breathe for a time. Jeyne was looking at him with a bemused crook at the corner of her lips. “You were mouthing something,” she said. 

“I’m sure I wasn’t,” he said, his cheeks hot. “You must be imagining things.” 

It seemed that while he had been dancing with shadows, Jeyne had finished cleaning and bandaging his cut. He lifted his hand and flexed his fingers. “Witch hazel,” he mused. “Clever trick. Where did you pick it up?”

Jeyne hesitated a moment before answering. “In the brothel,” she said. “Whenever I was lashed, one of the girls would spread witch hazel on the marks.” She pressed her lips together. “Not for my sake, of course. Most men prefer a girl without too many scars.”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have…” Theon ducked his head and fumbled with the dress in his lap, wanting to bury the stupid question and its terrible answer in the stitchwork. He had come to the end of his thread, though, and could not rethread his needle by himself. “We don’t have to talk about it.”

“It’s all right.” Jeyne took his needle from him, cut a length of thread, and slid its end through the eye of the needle. “Sometimes it helps to talk about it.”


	6. Falling

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sometimes it helps to talk about it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rape, violence, and underage sex are always, well... _present_ when you're dealing with post-ADWD Theon and Jeyne, but it's only in this chapter that they're explicitly discussed, so I've decided to go ahead and update the archive warnings. Reader beware.

**Theon**

Being allowed out of bed for the first time in weeks gave Theon a new appreciation for...well, just about everything, which put him in the best humor he’d been in since he had all his fingers and toes. He was in such good spirits that he agreed to accompany Jeyne to the servants’ supper at day’s end. The food was simple but plentiful: raw oysters, fish stew, warm bread with butter, and ale––plenty of it. The household bustled around the long trestle table, chattering amongst themselves as they filled their bowls and cups.

When Theon reached for a flagon of ale, Jeyne shot him an anxious glance. “Oh, it’s just a cup,” he said. “One cup.” He poured and tasted the ale, and, finding it better than he had expected, added, “Perhaps two.”

“One,” Jeyne said. 

Theon rolled his eyes, but it was an empty protest; the memory of evenings spent sitting soggy-brained and cotton-mouthed in the window of their room was not half so sweet as the taste of the ale. He was feeling clear-headed for the first time in long time, and he meant to stay that way. He spooned some stew into his bowl and chose a place at the end of one of the benches flanking the table.

The stew was fine, a touch overspiced for Theon’s liking, but it was the oysters he had been eyeing since they’d been brought in from the market earlier that day. He took one, opened its shell with a knife, and slurped down the briny mouthful of flesh inside. Jeyne stared at him, horrified. “How can you eat those things?”

“Easily,” he said. He had always been fond of oysters, and they didn’t need much chewing. “Back home we’d go diving for them, when the water wasn’t too cold. Ate them straight from the sea.”

“You couldn’t at least cook them first?”

He shook his head. “Cooking ruins the flavor.”

“Oi, Jeyne! How kind of you to save a seat for me.” A wild-haired youth with shoulders too broad for his lanky frame wedged himself onto the bench between Jeyne and the woman beside her. He was of an age with Jeyne, at most a year older––a boy, in truth, but man enough to make Jeyne bristle visibly.

“Marzo,” she said with a strained smile. “Theon, this is Marzo, Hatha’s older son. He’s apprenticed to a sailmender near the Purple Harbor.”

“Who told you that, my mother? She doesn’t know anything. I mean to become a bravo, once I get myself a good sword.” Marzo sawed a slice from a loaf of bread, slathered it in butter, and tore off a bite. “Who’s he?” he said with his mouth full, lifting his chin at Theon. “You said you came to Braavos with your brother, not your grandfather.”

“Is that any way to welcome Theon to our table?” Jeyne said, flustered. “Marzo, where’s your mother?”

“She’s ill. Woman’s troubles, I think.”

“How unfortunate for her,” Jeyne said, meaning, of course, _how unfortunate for us._ She leaned close to Theon and murmured, “He’s not like this when Hatha’s around.”

It was not often that Theon missed smelling like a full chamberpot on the hottest day of a southron summer, but now he was beginning to. Then, at least, Marzo would have kept his distance. Theon cracked and ate another oyster, hoping the boy would grow bored and decide to pester someone else.

They had no such luck. “My mother said I wasn’t to bother you,” Marzo told Jeyne, “but I’m not bothering you, am I?” He flashed a grin at Theon. “She likes me.”

Jeyne swirled her spoon through her stew, saying nothing. Theon could see the color slowly draining from her cheeks. “You know,” Marzo said, “I think you’re the prettiest girl we’ve ever had in this house. You smell good, too. Must be how they make maids across the Narrow Sea.” He reached out and brushed a lock of Jeyne’s hair over her shoulder. The touch was gentle enough, but Jeyne inhaled sharply through her nose, as if to stifle a cry of pain. “Did you have a suitor back home?”

Theon flexed his left hand, trying to relieve the itch in his missing fingers. _Leave it be,_ warned a voice in his head, a voice as cold and dry as Ramsay’s hand on the back of his neck. _She needs a man to protect her, not a...not_ you.

“No, you’re a good girl, you wouldn’t give yourself away like that.” Marzo snaked an arm around Jeyne’s waist and squeezed. “Bet you don’t even know what a man looks like under his breeches.”

Theon drove his knife into the wooden tabletop with a _thunk_ that silenced the conversation around the table. “You’d best remove your hands from her before someone removes them from your wrists.”

Marzo’s face reddened at the challenge. “Like who, old man? You?”

Theon stood. “You think I’m afraid of you, you little shit?”

“Stop!” 

Every eye in the room turned toward Jeyne. She was white as a freshly-laundered bedsheet, and tears shone on her cheeks. “Please stop,” she said. Her eyes had a glazed look that Theon remembered from Woodswatch-by-the-Pool, where he had found her fleeing a dream in a dark corridor. “Please stop. Please, please stop.”

Murmurs of concern circulated around the table. Marzo drew away from Jeyne, suddenly looking every bit a boy of five-and-ten. “I...I didn’t mean to...”

_She’s a woman wed, you know,_ Theon thought of telling him, _and her husband would shove his hand down your throat and turn you inside-out._ Instead, he curled his lip at the boy and turned his attention to Jeyne. A handful of women had gathered to fuss over her, but she did not seem to hear or see a one.

“She'll be fine,” he said as he bent and pulled her arm over his shoulders. “She just needs a rest.”

They must have made a comical sight climbing the stairs, with Theon limping and Jeyne hanging like a dead turkey from his shoulders. By the time they reached their room, she had regained enough strength to cross the threshold unsupported, albeit swaying slightly. “What a scene,” Theon said as lightly as he could manage. “I hope Hatha beats that boy within an inch of his life. In fact, perhaps I ought to pay her a vis––”

Without warning, Jeyne went to the chest of drawers, picked up the basin of water, and flung it to the floor. It shattered on impact, soaking the rushes and littering the floor with jagged chunks of ceramic. 

“I wish I _had_ lost my nose to the cold,” she moaned, trembling violently, “and my lips, and my ears too. I wish it were me with white hair and broken teeth. If I were ugly, no one would want me, no one would try to touch me. I should...I should just…”

For a moment Theon feared she would start ripping out her hair or clawing at her face, and he would have to take her arms and hold her until the fit passed. But she only dropped onto the bed, sobbing.

Theon picked up the shards of the basin, taking care not to step on one. He wrapped them in cloth and put the bundle by the door to dispose of later. Then he gathered the wet rushes and tossed them from the window, hearing them land with a soft _thump_ on the ground below. He looked at Jeyne, whose sobs had died down to sniffles. She lay on her side, her body a crescent, her long dark hair streaming across the quilt.

She did not move when Theon lay down beside her. Perhaps she did not even feel his weight on the bed. He watched her back rise and fall as she breathed, keenly aware of his heart thudding in his chest. She looked so small, so fragile, just as she had always looked when he called on her in Ramsay’s bedchamber. It would have been easy to slip an arm around her waist, to pull her into him and bury his face in her hair. _Would she want that?_ he wondered. _Do I?_

He could not have said how much time passed before she began to speak. “When I first came to the brothel,” she said in a thin wet voice, “I was locked in a little room with a pallet and a chamberpot. They gave me a skin of water and half a loaf of bread and left me there for days––perhaps as long as a week.”

The breath Theon drew then must have had an edge to it, for Jeyne said, “I know we don’t have to talk about it. I want to.”

“I...I won’t know what to say.”

“Don’t say anything. Just listen.” 

She waited a moment, and, when no protest was forthcoming, went on. “The room had no windows, so I could mark the passage of time only by the sounds from the common room below me. At night I would hear lutes and fiddles, laughter and dancing. The first night, I put my mouth to the floorboards and screamed for help until my throat was raw. The people downstairs had to hear me, I thought, for I could hear them, but nothing ever came of it.

“At last, someone came for me. Tonight was the night I was to begin earning my keep, I was told. I was to approach a man in the common room and entice him to...to lie with me, and until I did I would have neither food nor water, nor would I be allowed to return to my room.

“I was pulled down the stairs and thrust into the crowd. I wandered for a time, praying to vanish into nothingness. I was only a _girl_ , I...I had not even had my moon blood. The men terrified me. They were all huge and drunk and loud, and in the shadows cast by the lamplight, they looked like monsters.

“Until one. He was young, handsome in a roguish sort of way. He came up to me, smiling, and he said, _my, you’re a pretty one_ , and it was all I could do not to fall weeping into his arms. I was skinny and dirty and choking back tears, but still he called me pretty. Here at last was a good man, I thought. Here was someone who would save me. 

“He asked my name, and I whispered, _help me_. He cocked his head like he hadn’t heard me, so I said it again. _Help me. Please._ ”

Jeyne stopped, swallowed, and wiped her nose and cheeks with the back of her hand. “ _That’s not a name,_ he said. _Pretty, but not very bright._ He took me by the arm and shoved me face-first against a wall. _I’ve not seen you around before,_ he said as he pushed up my skirts. _New, are you? Still a maid?_ I was shaking, shaking as I had never shaken before, as if something had possessed me. _Ah, yes,_ he said. _Only a maid would quiver so sweetly._

“He did it right there in the common room, to the music of the lute and fiddle. I don’t think anyone even noticed.”

Jeyne wiped at her face again and rolled over to look at Theon. Her cheeks were chapped, her eyes red-rimmed and puffy, but to his surprise, she was smiling. “I’m sorry I called you ugly,” she said softly, almost shyly. “I didn’t mean it, truly.”

Theon shrugged. “I am, though.”

“I’ve seen worse.”

He dreamt that night of jumping from the walls of Winterfell with Jeyne in his arms. Together they tumbled through an endless tunnel of white, never hitting the ground. All around, the wind howled, but between them it was silent as death. _When will we stop falling?_ he asked her.

She looked at him, her face flushed from the cold. _Never,_ she said, as if it were something he should already know.

**Jeyne**

Jeyne woke with a head full of formless dreams––the smell of wine, the taste of tears, the sound of wool fibers parting in the path of a knife. No sooner did she wake than she knew she was going to be sick. Her stomach gave a violent lurch and she scrambled out of bed, seeking the basin. But there was no basin. She had broken it, stupidly, and there had not been time to find another.

She heard Theon stirring while she was crouching in the corner opposite his pallet, vomiting onto the floor. Then she felt his hands, one sweeping the hair from her face, the other resting on her back. She wasn’t sure if it was his touch or the color of her vomit, red like the broth from that night’s fish stew, that made her stomach twist anew.

By the time she’d heaved her last, her ankles were shaking beneath her. Nevertheless, she stood, in a quick jerk that made Theon stumble backward. “I’m all right,” she croaked, wiping her chin with the sleeve of her nightdress. “It’s all right.”

He reached for her. “Can I––”

“No.” She backed away, groping behind her for the door handle. “Please.”

In the corridor, she reeled and weaved as though she’d had too much to drink. _Why did I tell him?_ she thought. _Why did I tell him?_ It had felt so good in the moment. For so long she’d kept her memories inside, burning like a held breath. When she’d let one out, let it go, it had become lighter than air.

But men weren’t supposed to see the color of a lady’s stockings, let alone the stuff of her nightmares. Had all of Jeyne’s shame been worn away so easily? What sort of girl told her sordid secrets to a man who hadn’t even asked to hear them? _A whore,_ said a voice in her head, salty as warm flesh. _You may as well be an honest-to-gods whore, leaning from a window with your teats out, calling out to every man who passes. ‘Oi, bet you’d like to hear about the night I lost my maidenhead!’_

The kitchen had but a single window, with thick yellow glass that let in only the weakest wash of moonlight. Jeyne felt in near-total darkness for a pail and a rag. _It makes no matter,_ said the voice. _He’s already seen the worst of you. Seen it, smelled it, put his mouth on it. It’s all he thinks about when he looks at you. It’s all_ anyone _thinks about when they look at you._

“Stop,” Jeyne said aloud. A rack of pots clattered as she jarred it with a shoulder. “Stop!”

_Everyone knows what you’ve done. Everyone knows what you_ are. _That’s why Ramsay was so awful to you. He knew you weren’t what he was promised. They put you in lace and lambswool, but they couldn't cover up the whore._

She lost her footing and fell to the floor, weeping. She wished Theon were with her, but if he had been, she knew she would have wished him gone.

She didn’t remember bringing a rag and a pail of water back upstairs. She didn’t remember cleaning up her mess or crawling into her bed. All she knew was that morning came eventually, and when the sun pried open her eyelids she rose and dressed just as she always did. She said nothing to Theon about what had happened the night before, and he said nothing to her. She didn’t know what she would have done if he had. He dreamt often, she knew. Perhaps he’d believe her if she told him it was all a dream.

At breakfast in the kitchen, Hatha thrust Marzo before Jeyne, pink-cheeked and surly. “My son wishing to beg your pardon for his behavior last night,” said Hatha in her heavy Braavosi accent.

Marzo scowled at the floor. “I'm not going to beg for anything,” he muttered, “but I'm sorry I upset you. Even though I only meant to pay you a compliment.”

Jeyne felt lightheaded, and for a moment she thought she would faint. “I forgive you,” she said, in a voice so soft she half-hoped Marzo would not hear her at all.

**Theon**

When he was well and truly sick of suffering through any dish tougher than soft bread, Theon did as Jeyne had urged him to and went to have his broken teeth pulled at the House of the Red Hands. It was a red brick building in the mold of a temple, nestled not far from the true temples in the heart of the city. Fazian’s chambers were tucked into a high corner overlooking the sweetwater river. Amid his shelves of herbs and potions was a special chair that reclined with the press of a lever, and it was there he bade Theon sit. 

Theon skimmed his tongue along the jagged edges of his teeth while Fazian prepared a dose of milk of the poppy. “What will you do with them?” Theon asked.

“I had not thought,” Fazian said drily. “Make a mosaic, perhaps.” He gave Theon a cup. “Drink.”

The contents of the cup were as bitter as a grudge and as powerful as a punch to the face. The next thing Theon knew, he was coming to, his heart throbbing through his gums and jaw. It took him some time to find the strength to stand, and it would take longer still for the milk of the poppy to wear off completely. Jeyne walked him back to Lady Iolanthe’s manse, lending him her shoulder when he swayed. She wanted him to take her bed, as he had when he was ill months before, but he brushed her off and lay down on his pallet. Within moments, he was asleep again. 

He dreamt of sitting at the head of a table set with a splendid feast: fat sweet crabs fresh from the sea, mounds of mashed buttered neeps, a lush green salad with almonds and apples, hot bread with honey, duck basted in wine and spices, and in the center of the table a red roast larger than any he’d ever seen. The smells made his belly growl, but when he put the food in his mouth, all he could taste was blood.

He woke hungry and was grateful for the broth Jeyne brought him. Before he drank it, he coaxed the little wads of cotton from the empty sockets between his remaining teeth. The cotton was stiff and brown with dried blood, but it no longer flowed fresh, and he was grateful for that as well.

When he had finished his broth, he closed his eyes and let his head rest against the wall at the head of his pallet. Jeyne was preparing for bed. He could hear the rustle of fabric as she changed into her nightdress and the tinkle of water as she washed her face. The window’s shutters stood open a crack, admitting a breeze that carried the smell of the sea.

Theon opened his eyes and saw Jeyne standing by the chest of drawers, pulling a comb through her hair. “Can I tell you…” His jaw ached and his tongue was clumsy, flopping about in his mouth like a fish on a riverbank. “I mean, may I…”

Jeyne paused, the lamplight limning her eyes in gold. “You may tell me anything you wish.”

She came and sat beside Theon on his pallet. His knees poked up beneath his quilt, a ragged thing, probably older than Lady Iolanthe. He stared down at it until his vision fuzzed. “It was Damon’s turn with me,” he said. “My wrists were tied to a rafter, so I had to stand on my toes to keep my weight off my shoulders. I was shredded, more blood than skin, and my vow not to make a sound had become a vow not to scream had become a desperate bid to keep from weeping. Finally Ramsay said, _enough. This is growing tiresome._ ”

He didn’t know what had moved him to speak of that day. It wasn’t that he _wanted_ to, exactly. It was just that the words were _there_ , on his tongue, and it was almost as if he had no choice; it was almost as if they might have thrust themselves into Jeyne’s ears without his help, had he refused to give it. 

“ _Tiresome?_ I said, and smiled. It was agony just moving my lips, but I smiled. _Now_ that _hurts. Lash me if you must, but don’t_ insult _me._

“He came close to me and took my chin between his thumb and forefinger. _You find this funny, do you?_ he said. _Quite,_ I told him. He looked at his men behind him and said, _mind letting us in on the jape?_

“ _Where to begin?_ I said. _This is all one great jape. You’ll have your fun, but you didn’t bring me here alive just to beat me to death. You_ need _me._ I thought it would anger him, being caught out, but if anything he seemed pleased. _Death?_ he said. _Is that what you’re afraid of?_ His eyes...you remember his eyes, how they could make you sweat in the coldest room. I made myself look straight into them, and I said, _what makes you think I’m afraid?_ ”

Theon paused and rubbed his jaw gingerly. He had to tread carefully, as through a bog. Each step could be the step that made the ground collapse beneath him. Each word could be the word that dragged him back to the dungeon, that ripped Jeyne away from him and put Ramsay in her place. He had to swallow hard to push down the fear climbing his throat.

“He threw his head back and started to laugh. After a moment, his men caught on and joined him. They laughed until they were wheezing and choking, until tears ran down their cheeks, and when they were through Ramsay looked to me and said, _it_ is _quite funny, when you put it that way._

“He signalled his men and they were on me in a blink––two of them, maybe three, bracing my head and neck. Another one brought Ramsay a hammer. A big heavy one, like blacksmiths use. _Now I’ll show you how we jape at the Dreadfort,_ he said. He tested the hammer a few times, bouncing its head off his palm. _Give us a nice smile,_ he said. _You were so quick to smile before._

“I wouldn’t, so he had his men shove a block of wood into my mouth to hold it open. And he…” Theon faltered, wanting, for a moment, to turn to Jeyne and ask _please, can I stop now?_ She would say yes, of course. She would say _you don’t have to ask permission._ “He could only get at my front teeth, but the impact made my jaw spasm, and I bit down on the block so hard that I cracked a few back teeth too. I remember the sound it made, the _crunch._ I can still hear it in my head.

“The pain was so bad and the taste of blood was so strong that I threw up, but it couldn’t get out around the block. For an instant I thought I was going to choke. Then they cut me down and it all came tumbling out, the block and the vomit and the blood and my teeth in a hundred pieces. All I could do was lie there in it, whimpering like a child. I couldn’t speak, but the word in my head was _help. Help me,_ I wanted to cry, even though I knew nobody would.”

It all seemed so...small, looking back. At the time it had been big, so big it crowded out everything else that had ever happened to him, but now he saw it for what it was: a small scene in the small life of a small man. _Person. Creature._ “And why should they?” he said, snorting weakly. “I was a stupid little prick, thinking I could play his games and win. I deserved what I got.”

“No,” Jeyne broke in, a strange urgency in her voice. Looking up at her, Theon saw the same urgency glittering in her eyes. “No you didn’t. Don’t say that. Don’t ever say that.”

He stared at her dumbly, amazed. “You don’t know what I deserve.”

She reached out to cradle his jaw. Her touch was feather-light, and it alarmed Theon––no, it _scared_ him––to realize that he wanted to lean into it. “I know it isn’t this.” 

A week later, Theon returned to the House of the Red Hands for a follow-up examination. “You’re healing nicely,” Fazian said when he was through poking around in Theon’s mouth. “Now is not the time to develop a taste for molasses candy, but you’ll be able to eat most things without pain.”

He released the lever on the reclining chair, letting Theon sit up. “It was Jeyne who bade me come here, you know,” he said as he dug in his pockets for the coin to pay the healer’s fee. 

“The girl takes good care of you.”

Theon grimaced. “I’ve told her she doesn’t have to.”

“Perhaps she wants to.” Fazian was not a man to smile easily, but there was a certain warmth in his voice when he said, “Some of us help ourselves by helping others.”


	7. Uncloaking

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everyone is lucky during the Uncloaking. Everyone except for Theon, that is.

**Theon**

“You want to go.”

Braavos was alight with paper lanterns in a hundred colors. The sounds of laughter and music wove through the buildings and over the water to the terrace of Lady Iolanthe’s manse, where Theon and Jeyne sat huddled into their cloaks.

“I don’t,” Jeyne said. “Truly, Theon.”

The household had been celebrating the Uncloaking for ten days now. Each evening as the sun set, everyone from the servants’ grubby children up to Lady Iolanthe herself streamed over the bridge into the city, wearing fine clothes and garish masks. Each day at dawn they dragged themselves home to sleep until it was time to dress for another night’s revelry. Beds went unmade, floors unswept, meals unprepared, but no one seemed to mind.

“If you want to go,” Theon said, “you should go.”

“How many times must I say it? _I don’t want to go._ ”

For ten nights Jeyne and Theon had sat on the terrace eating grapes and cheese and watching the festival, what little they could see of it, from afar. Tonight was the last night. At midnight the Titan would roar, the revelers would cast off their masks, and everyone would return home, to wake the next morning and resume their daily duties. Whoever did not take part tonight would not have a chance until this time next year. _And who’s to say where we’ll be then?_ Theon thought.

“Weren’t you and Sansa mad about this sort of thing––costumes, music, dancing?”

Jeyne’s eyes reflected the many-colored lanterns, flickering as they bobbed on the breeze. “Things change,” she said softly.

“Not everything has to.” His mind made up, Theon stood and extended a hand to pull Jeyne to her feet. “Quickly now,” he urged. “It’s just a few hours till midnight.”

They had not a stitch of finery to their names, which Jeyne lamented briefly, but she crossed the bridge readily enough even in her servant’s garb. When they reached the city on the other side, she took Theon’s hand, and he felt her pulse fluttering with excitement. 

The mask-sellers were out in droves that night, hawking the last of their wares at a tenth of their initial price. Jeyne bought a half-mask adorned with blue and silver feathers and glass beads that sparkled like water. Theon’s mask was a red fox, with small pointed teeth poking out of its grinning muzzle.

Theon and Jeyne had been in Braavos half a year, but they had never seen the city so alive with color and sound. Garlands of paper lanterns were strung over the narrow streets so thickly that the night sky seemed to have turned purple and turquoise and gold. Lutists and bell-ringers, drummers and horn-blowers congregated on every corner, filling the air with music. Vendors enticed the revelers with sugared almonds and crystal candy and honeyed wine in clever little paper cones. Around the Moon Pool, a troupe of mummers reenacted the Uncloaking of Uthero with painted wooden ships tied to their bodies and sails waving on their backs.

On one corner, a man in a long-beaked bird mask cried out to passersby to try their luck at the shell game. “Oh, let’s,” Jeyne enthused, tugging Theon crosswise through the flow of traffic.

Theon cast a doubtful glance at the three walnut shells lined up in front of the man in the bird mask. “Do I really seem like a lucky sort to you?”

The man, overhearing, grinned and called out to them in a thickly-accented take on the Common Tongue. “Everyone is being lucky during the Uncloaking!” 

Theon went first and lost, but on Jeyne’s turn, the man in the bird mask lifted the shell she’d chosen to reveal the pea underneath, and Jeyne clapped for joy like a child. Her winnings bought them each a cone of wine, so sweet it tickled the tip of Theon’s tongue.

They wandered on and came to a square where revelers danced to the omnipresent music, a blur of swirling skirts and fanciful faces. Theon watched Jeyne watching them. He remembered how she and Sansa had once twirled through the halls and courtyards of Winterfell, taking turns at playing the lord and lady, holding up their skirts and counting their steps. He heard their high, musical laughter echoing through the years. He could tell Jeyne did, too.

Walking was hard enough for Theon; he would look a tremendous fool trying to dance. But the Braavosi would forget the poor dancing of a stranger in a fox mask by the next morning. Jeyne would remember dancing for the first time since her girlhood for far longer.

If he thought about it, he knew, he would talk himself out of it, so he didn’t think. He just pulled Jeyne into the outer ring of dancers, catching her about the waist and spinning her in a circle in time with the couples on either side of them. At first, she moved stiffly, and her eyes darted back and forth beneath her mask as if it were she who had reason to fear being watched. Theon brought a hand to her cheek and her eyes to his own, looking out at her through the almond-shaped slits in the fox’s face. She smiled up at him and all at once felt light as a cloud in his arms, so light he feared she’d float away if he let her go.

The dance was not one Theon knew, but it was simple enough––just a spin, a slide, a dip, and a clap, and it began all over again. Of course, _simple_ didn’t necessarily mean easy. Theon’s slides were more like shuffles, and his spins were wont to turn into stumbles. Somehow, though, he couldn’t find it in himself to care. Truth be told, if Ramsay and his Bastard’s Boys had been standing round jeering, Theon would not have seen them. He was looking only at Jeyne. 

When the Titan roared, it shook the city from cobblestones to rooftops, and a cheer went up from the crowd. Masks were thrown off, cups drained, companions embraced. Jeyne swung her mask by its ribbons, her cheeks pink and dewy as a rose petal. Theon reminded himself to smile with his mouth shut before he shed his fox’s face.

It took them some time to get back to the manse, what with all the city crowding the streets at once. In their room, Jeyne fell onto her bed, laughing. “Gods, what a night,” she breathed, giddy from the rush of the revelry and perhaps a few too many sips of wine. “I haven’t had such fun since King’s Landing.”

_Fun_ , that was the word. Theon had all but forgotten it. How long had it been since he’d had _fun_? 

He sat on the bed beside Jeyne and unlaced his shoes. His feet, having put up with more strain than they were accustomed to, were complaining rather loudly, and seemed disinclined to stop unattended. He propped his right leg on his left knee, squeezed his foot through its stocking, then pulled off the stocking, grimacing. Feet were not a thing of beauty to begin with, but his were especially ugly, with their missing toes and grisly scars.

The bedclothes rustled behind him. “Are you all right?”

“Quite,” Theon said lightly, trying to wring the ache from his foot. “Only you should know better than to take your poor grandfather out dancing on his frail old feet.” He realized with a start that Jeyne had sat up and was peering over his shoulder. “Well, don’t _look._ ”

“Oh, come. It’s not so bad as all that.” There was a tug on his collar and suddenly he was on his back, blinking up at Jeyne. She met his eyes with a half-smile on her lips and a crown of lamplight atop her head. “You dwell so on what’s _wrong_ with you,” she said, sliding a leg across his middle so that she sat astride him. “But do you ever think of all that’s right?”

She took both of his hands and slipped her fingers through his. “See?” she said, her smile widening. “You may not have all your bits and pieces, but you still have hands that hold.” She lay their hands on his chest. “You still have lungs that breathe, and a heart that beats.”

_Stop,_ Theon knew he should say. _Stop. You have to stop._ She would have, had he asked it of her. But the words melted like snowflakes on his tongue. “You have ears that hear, and eyes that see, and a nose that smells.” Together, they touched each gift as she named it. “You have a tongue that speaks.” She brought their hands back to his chest and leaned in close, so close that he could taste the sweetness of wine on her breath. “And lips…”

It wasn’t just her breath that was sweet. Her mouth was sweet, too, and hot, and eager. As she kissed him, her hair tumbled over her shoulders and hung around them, a veil of dark silk. Theon pulled his hands free of hers and smoothed them up her thighs to the small of her back. He felt her quiver at his touch. He felt the drumming of her heart in her breast, and a wakening below his belly, the rush of blood…

He turned his head aside, breaking the kiss. “Enough,” he croaked. He tried to think of something else, something _better_ to say, but could only repeat, “Enough.”

He sat up and Jeyne climbed off of him, rumpled and red-cheeked, breathing heavily. “Theon,” she said. He swung his legs over the side of the bed. “Theon,” she said again, “I’m sorry––”

“It’s no fault of yours,” he said. Shame burned in his chest at the thought that she would blame herself for this. “It’s me, it’s my...foolishness. I let myself believe I could have it.”

“It?” 

“This.” He rubbed both hands over his face. “ _You._ ”

She was quiet for a moment. Then, in a voice barely above a whisper, she said, “You can have me.”

“You may give yourself to me. That doesn’t mean I can have you.”

He had meant to go down to the kitchen, to splash some cool water on his face and bed down on a pile of flour sacks. He had meant to go. He should have gone.

“You…” Jeyne somehow managed to clear her throat delicately, though it was not a thing most people did with any pretension of delicacy. “You must know I don’t mind that we can’t...you know, lie together. I don’t need that.”

Something cold trickled from the nape of Theon’s neck down his spine. “What?” he said, turning.

“I don’t even want it, truthfully.”

He just stared at her, speechless, breathless, motionless. Bloodless, too, it seemed; the cold had spread from his spine all through his body, such that he thought his very life’s blood must have evaporated in his veins. He was an empty husk, a shriveled dead thing that had dared to dream of being loved by a warm, soft, living girl. 

Jeyne stared back at him, her brow knit. When understanding came, it widened her eyes and stole the color from her face. “You thought I didn’t know,” she said.

_Of course she knows,_ murmured the voice in Theon’s head, a voice that came from nowhere and yet felt far closer to him than Jeyne had ever been. _Everyone knows. They can see it. They can_ smell _it. You could bathe thrice a day and wear flowers in your hair, like the first Reek, and you would still stink of ruin._

“Theon, listen to me, it’s not––” she was reaching for him even before he shrank away from her “––Ramsay, he liked to...brag, while he...while we...it excited him, I think. Making me listen to the terrible things he’d done.”

He shoved his feet back into his shoes and got up, moving numbly across the room. “Theon, _please._ ”

He wanted to strike Jeyne hard across the face, to knock her onto her back and wrap his hands tightly around her neck. _Please_ what? he wanted to shout at her. _What do you_ want _from me? I have_ nothing _to give you, and you_ know _it. You’ve known all the time._

But dead things did not shout. Dead things did not rage. Dead things only slipped quietly away.


	8. Spring

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Theon ruins a pudding, and an unexpected change of seasons precedes an equally unexpected visitor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Time to stop watching Vine compilations on Youtube and write some fuckin' fanfic.

**Jeyne**

Jeyne’s mother had died when Jeyne was too small to remember anything but the way she had smelled, but her father had memories enough for the both of them. All through Jeyne’s girlhood, he told her stories of her mother: how she’d been fair as a flower and gentle as the summer breeze; how her voice had put songbirds to shame; how he’d fallen in love with her after one dance when first they met at a feast.

Jeyne was about eight years old at the time, and had taken to sighing over Mikken’s strapping young apprentice. _But how did you know?_ she asked, winding a lock of her hair around her finger. _How do you know you’re in love?_

Father smiled. It was the smile Jeyne saw only when he spoke of Mother––a smile that was equal parts happy and sad. _I knew I loved her because when I held her, everything else fell away. The past, the future, the people around us––they all disappeared. All I could see was her._

**Theon**

For several days following the Uncloaking, Theon was rarely seen outside the kitchen. He left only when his duties demanded it and when the household gathered for a meal. Sometimes he would snatch a plum or a heel of bread to eat while he wandered the islet; more often he simply wandered, hunched against the bitter wind, until he judged it safe to return. Eating was easier now than it had once been, but he had little desire for food. 

He knew why Jeyne had told him how she knew what she knew, but he wished she hadn’t. He did not sleep, so he did not dream, but the nightmares came all the same: Ramsay on top of Jeyne, _inside_ her, grunting with each thrust. _You’ll have to do better than_ that _if you want me to believe you,_ he would have said when she wept. _You should have heard your little bedmaid begging for mercy when I put my knife just here._ He’d have cupped her sex in one hand and squeezed. _Of course, it didn’t take him long to start begging for something else._

Theon could not imagine ever facing Jeyne again. It turned his stomach to think of all the time they’d been together already––all the time she’d let him think she might see him as more than an object of pity. It turned his stomach to think of how stupid he’d been. _She doesn’t fear you. She fears Marzo, swaggering stripling that he is, but she sleeps soundly within a whisper’s distance of_ you. _Why did you think that was?_ If he had to look her in the eyes again, knowing that she knew the truth, it would shatter him as surely as Ramsay’s hammer had shattered his teeth.

_Why did you tell her that story? Because you thought she would understand? Because you thought you were the same? You’re not the same. For all she’s suffered, she’s still a pretty young girl with promise in her stars. And you are…_

_Bleak, weak, freak. You have to remember._

One night, while the household supped on fried fish and boiled leeks, Theon left the islet and went into the city. Debris from the Uncloaking still littered the streets. He paused once to look down at a paper lantern floating on its side in a puddle, lonely as a single cloud in a clear sky.

Outside an inn near the Ragman’s Harbor, whores shivered in the cold. One sang out to Theon as he went by. “Shall we go inside and warm up, love?”

Theon stopped and thought. He had a bit of money in his pocket. If he paid the girl, it wouldn’t matter that he couldn’t fuck her; he could take her upstairs and beat her bloody if he wished.

He didn’t want to beat her, though. He didn’t even want to fuck her, in truth. She was pox-scarred and dreadfully thin, with jutting collarbones and no teats to speak of. “What’s your name?” he asked her.

She grinned. “What would you like it to be?”

Theon returned to the manse like a man––a creature, in any case––being dragged to his death.

From the first there had been reports of Jeyne hovering outside the kitchen, but it wasn’t until the fourth day that she actually crossed the threshold. When she did, the kitchen staff trickled out one by one. Theon was disgusted. _Do you have any idea what they’d do on the Iron Islands to thralls who shirked their duties so their fellows could parley in privacy?_ he wanted to bark at them, near as much as he wanted to say, _Don’t leave me alone with her. Please._

But they left, and when the doors swung shut he saw Jeyne from the corner of his eye, standing just a few feet away. He ground his few back teeth together, shook his hair over his face, and trained his gaze on the pudding he was preparing. It was not just any scullion who was entrusted with such work, and he did not intend to let Jeyne distract him from it. He took an egg and broke it into the dish before him.

“Theon.”

Theon discarded the empty eggshell and broke another egg into the dish.

“ _Theon,_ ” Jeyne said again. “Will you at least look at me?” 

He broke another egg into the dish. 

“I don’t understand. Nothing’s changed, not really.”

_Nothing and everything,_ he might have said. Instead, he broke another egg into the dish.

“I told you I don’t care. It doesn’t matter.”

_Oh, doesn’t it?_ he might have said. _Had I only known._ Instead, he broke another egg into the dish.

“Do you mean to ignore me forever?”

_Longer, if need be,_ he might have said. Instead, he broke another egg into the dish.

“What in the world could possibly take so many eggs?”

Theon blinked. He realized that the contents of the dish were no longer a pudding, nor indeed anything resembling a pudding at any stage, but a great soggy mass of eggs. He stared at it for a moment, confounded. Then he began to laugh.

It all seemed so _funny_ : the eggs staring up at him like wobbly yellow eyeballs, Jeyne standing there wringing her hands, the kitchen staff likely eavesdropping in the corridor, his secret that was no secret at all. Once he had thought himself a prince, and now here he was, ruining a pudding in a Braavosi noblewoman’s kitchen. He laughed until his sides ached and tears streamed down his cheeks. He laughed until he thought Asha had been right to call him mad. He laughed until he felt lightheaded and had to sit down on the floor. 

“Theon,” Jeyne said, kneeling in front of him, “are you all––”

He took her face in both hands and kissed her hungrily. She gave a muffled squeak of surprise, but did not pull away; rather, she kissed him back, taking short fluttering breaths through her nose. After a few moments, her hands rose and she wove her fingers into his hair. He tasted the tears he had shed in his mirth, warm and salty on his lips and hers.

At length he withdrew, stroking his thumb up and down her cheek. “You don’t look well,” she said, studying him. “Have you been sleeping? Have you been eating?” He rolled his eyes. “This isn’t a jape, Theon. I don't care how black a mood you're in, you mustn’t––” 

He moved his thumb to Jeyne’s lips and let it rest there, silencing her. “I don’t want you to want me just because I can’t hurt you,” he said.

Her eyes filled with a sadness as soft as rain. “I believe you could hurt me very badly if you wished,” she said. “I trust you won’t.”

It was perhaps the most terrifying thing she could have said. 

That night, Theon returned to his pallet in the corner of his and Jeyne’s room. Sleep came easily, but it didn’t stay long. He dreamt that he was the man who had taken Jeyne’s maidenhood in the common room of the brothel. He heard her whimpering as her body yielded to him, felt her warmth around his cock. When he woke, he woke sweating, with a shameful ache between his thighs.

He staggered over to the window, threw open the shutters and drank in the cold night air. In her bed, Jeyne stirred. “Did you dream?” she murmured, sounding half-lost in a dream herself.

“No.”

Theon leaned against the windowsill and looked down at the honey locust, its clean black branches reaching for him like fingers. Giant’s fingers, they seemed to him, adorned with dainty jade rings. _Rings?_ He craned further out the window, squinting. _No. Leaves._

––

Spring arrived sooner than anyone had dared to hope, and with it came tidings of peace in Westeros. Stories of what had happened there raced through the streets as swiftly as horses––stories of the Wall cracking and crumbling; of an army of dead men doing battle with the living; of dragons barreling through the sky with jaws agape, bathing the earth in fire––but they were only hearsay. All the people of Braavos knew for sure was what they could see with their own eyes: the canals thawing, the days lengthening, warm rains falling, and Westerosi refugees leaving the city in droves, their hunger for home so fierce that they went without knowing what they would find.

Theon and Jeyne were not among them. They didn’t talk about it; they simply went about their lives, toiling in the kitchen and bedchamber, taking meals with the household, and going for an occasional stroll along the shoreline or into the city. Whenever Theon thought of going home, a hard knot formed in his belly. In Braavos he and Jeyne lived in a state of suspension, as if no time were really passing. When they left, life would begin again. When they left he would be Theon Greyjoy, prince of the Iron Islands, not just Theon the scullion in Lady Iolanthe’s kitchen, and what he did next would _matter._

Months went by. One morning, Theon was sent to the market to pick up a few things for that night’s supper. As he crossed the bridge into the city, he had to sidestep a small party going the other way, led by a bedraggled young man in a cloak and jerkin. “I beg your pardon, friend,” said the young man, taking Theon by the arm, “but do you know––” Theon pulled his arm from the man’s grasp. He paused, blinking at Theon. Then, his eyes grew wide. “ _Theon?_ ”

Now Theon was the one to pause and blink, working to assemble the man’s features into a face he knew. He was a comely sort––almost pretty, like a woman, though he had a desperate, tired look in his eye. “Tris,” Theon said at last, startled by the realization. “Tristifer Botley. What in the Drowned God’s briny arsehole are _you_ doing here?”

“Why, looking for you, of course!” Tris exclaimed. “Couldn’t have made it easy for us, could you? I’ll wager I’ve given away half the wealth of the Iron Islands greasing palms for word of your whereabouts." He reached out to clap Theon on the shoulder. “You look well.”

Theon knew exactly how he looked, and he did not appreciate being lied to. “You look half a corpse,” he said, shaking Tris off. “Why, dare I ask, did you go to such trouble to find me?”

“Well, for your sister. It was her who sent us.”

“She lives, then.” 

“Oh, yes. She was too busy setting things right on Pyke to seek you out herself, but…” A flush climbed Tris’s neck. “She said if I found you––if I brought you home––she’d take me for her husband.”

_So that’s why he looks like he hasn’t slept in weeks,_ Theon thought, remembering the eager little boy who had tailed Asha like a puppy whenever they went to Lordsport as children. He wondered if he was fated to spend his life being dragged eastward and westward by men who wished to wed his sister. “When do you mean to go back?”

“Straightaway, now we’ve got you.”

Theon thought of Jeyne, humming to herself as she smoothed Lady Iolanthe’s bedclothes or freshened the water in her basin. Briefly, he entertained the notion of leaving Braavos that very moment, without a word. _It would hurt at first, but it might be for the best, in the long run._ He shook his head. “I can’t just up and go, Tris.”

“Why not?”

Theon proceeded across the bridge, waving Tris and his party along with him. “Come,” he said. “Find an inn. Get some rest. I’ll set my affairs in order and meet you at the Ragman’s Harbor come morning. Surely my sister’s cunt––” Tris opened his mouth to object “––forgive me, her _hand_ will keep an extra day.”

Later that day, in their room, Theon told Jeyne about Tris and why he had come. It was hard to tell what Jeyne made of the whole business; as he spoke, she nodded slowly, her face unreadable. When he was through, she said, “Do you want to go with him?”

She was sitting on the edge of her bed, Theon standing a few feet away from her. He shrugged. “Tris has been in love with Asha since we were children,” he said, “so it doesn’t really bear thinking about. I imagine he’d drag me home hogtied if he had to.”

“Yes, but do you _want_ to go with him?”

“It doesn’t bear thinking about,” Theon said again. “I’m going. Do _you_ want to come with me?”

Jeyne looked at her lap. “I don’t want to stay here alone.”

“You have friends in the household. You wouldn’t be alone.”

“I suppose not.” 

Outside, the sun was setting behind a veil of clouds, filling the sky with muted pink light. Theon puttered about the room, taking stock of his belongings. Though they’d been in Braavos almost a year, he would leave with little more than he’d brought. Other than his clothes and shoes, all he had to his name was a cloak, a knife, and a handful of copper coins. It wasn’t much, but it was more than he'd had in Ramsay’s service, when not even the rags on his back––nor indeed his back itself––had belonged to him.

“Do you remember when I arrived at the camp in the barrowlands?” Jeyne asked. She drew her legs up onto the bed and sat back against the pillows, tilting her head so that it lay on her shoulder. “I was so afraid, and I felt so alone. It had been years since I'd seen a familiar face.” She smiled faintly. “And then I saw you.”

Theon shook his head. “Not me. Not then. You saw Reek.”

“I don't know. I don't remember Reek.”

“Well, he was there, I assure you.”

“I don't doubt it, but I didn't see him. I saw you.” Jeyne closed her eyes and spoke in a murmur, as if in her sleep. “And I didn't feel quite so alone anymore.”


	9. Shadows

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Going home was always inevitable, but it's not going to be easy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd like to thank [Butterfly](http://nobodysuspectsthebutterfly.tumblr.com/) for the years and years of tireless meta that helped me form my idea of postwar Westeros--who lives, who dies, who rules, and under what circumstances. It's secondary to the story here, but necessary; Jeyne and Theon can't go home in a void.
> 
> And, of course, thanks to all of you who've left comments and kudos. It's scary to throw your work out there, and so gratifying to see even a few people, well...catch it!

**Theon**

When Theon and Jeyne arrived at the Ragman’s Harbor, having packed up all their worldly possessions and said their farewells to the men and women of Lady Iolanthe’s household, Tris fairly gaped at Jeyne. “Lady Arya?”

Jeyne reddened and looked at her feet, as if she feared it would be rude to correct him. Theon laughed. He had forgotten that Tris and Jeyne had met once before. It was remarkable that he should recognize her now, though, with her nose pink and her eyes dry. “Not quite,” Theon said as they boarded the _Starling_ , a mid-sized trading galley much like the one they had taken from Eastwatch-by-the-Sea; Theon had long forgotten its name. “Jeyne, this is Tristifer Botley, my would-be good-brother. Tris, this is Jeyne Poole, my...” He paused, at a loss. “This is Jeyne Poole.”

It was a fine clear day with a strong westward wind, and Theon’s spirits were high. It would be good to be at sea again, he thought. Jeyne wished to have a last look at Braavos, so they stood together at the stern of the ship as it cast off into the lagoon, watching the city become a memory before their eyes. 

“Do you suppose the Titan’s a eunuch?” Theon asked when they passed beneath it.

Jeyne’s lips crooked upward at their corners. “What?”

Theon jutted his chin up at the shadows between the Titan’s great legs. “He hasn’t got any bits that I can see.”

They would find Westeros much changed when they came ashore, Tris told them as they sat on deck that night, supping on salt cod and biscuits. King’s Landing was no more, the Iron Throne was no more, and the Seven Kingdoms were again seven kingdoms in more than name, though as yet there were no true kings. Power lay not in names nor riches, but where walls stood and food grew. 

The Iron Islands were rather more sparsely peopled than they had been, as most of the men who had gone with the Crow’s Eye to wage war on the green lands had not come home. Lord Balon’s brothers were all dead. All that remained of the Greyjoy family were Theon and Asha and their mother, and she was a Harlaw by blood. She still lived, in all her frailty, with her sister and brother at Ten Towers. 

Jon Snow was dead, as were the others who had led the war for the dawn from dragonback. Part of Theon was glad of it; with Jon gone, there would be no one to enforce his exile. Another part of him envied the boy. It was not so long ago that he had wanted nothing so much as a good death, and Jon’s was truly one for the singers. Theon might outlive his onetime foster brother by a year or ten, but he wouldn’t be remembered half as well.

All the time Tris spoke of what had become of Westeros and her people, Jeyne listened intently, leaning toward him with a tautness of body that made her look as if she were being pulled forward by a string. At the news of Sansa Stark’s return to Winterfell, the string slackened noticeably. Yet the tension remained, in her jaw and eyes, until she said, “And Ramsay? Is he dead?”

Theon felt fairly sure of the answer; neither he nor Jeyne would have returned to Westeros had they reason to believe Ramsay still lived. But he too looked to Tris, who had emptied a skin of ale and had the flush to prove it. “The Bastard of Bolton?” he said. “Oh, yes. For quite some time now.”

Theon was dozing in his bunk that night when he heard his door creak gently open. Before he could sit up, Jeyne had crept into his bunk with him. She curled into the space between his arm and his side as if she were made to fit there, the smell of the night crisp on her skin.

“It’s evil, isn’t it?” she whispered. “Being glad of death––anyone’s death.”

 _But he’s not dead. He’s right here, lying between us. Don’t you feel him? Don’t you see him when you close your eyes?_ “No,” Theon said, pressing his cheek to Jeyne’s hair. 

––

All throughout the second week of the journey, a gentle rain greyed the skies and wet the decks of the Starling. One afternoon, Jeyne brought up a pail in hopes of collecting rainwater in which to wash their clothes. Theon watched her watching the pail fill. She wore a kerchief over her hair and the sleeves of her blouse pushed to her elbows. A raindrop struck her forehead and slid down her nose, hanging at its tip a moment before falling soundlessly to the deck.

“Will you seek passage to Winterfell from White Harbor,” Theon said, “or will you send word to Sansa and wait?”

Jeyne glanced up at him, confusion wrinkling her brow. “Who said anything about Sansa or Winterfell?”

“Winterfell is your home,” he said. “You and Sansa were sisters in all but blood. I assumed…”

“Winterfell’s not my home. It was just...someplace I lived.” Jeyne drifted a few steps along the rail, then stopped, gazing out at the sea. It was flat as a tabletop that day, the rain too light to disturb it. “Sometimes it feels like even less. Like a place I visited in a dream.”

“Sansa––”

“Sansa was a girlhood friend, but we're not little girls anymore. And she's not my sister. That much I understood quite clearly even when I _was_ a little girl.” Jeyne pulled the kerchief from her head and used it to wipe the mist from her face. “Sansa is a Stark," she said flatly. "She belongs in Winterfell. I don’t.”

Theon swallowed. “Then where will you go?”

“I thought I was going with you.”

 _I thought._ Theon had not allowed himself to think, not about this. Did it terrify him to imagine parting with Jeyne, perhaps forever? _Yes._ Did that mean he wanted to bring her home? _I don’t know._ “You wouldn’t like the Iron Islands,” he said. “They’re nothing but bad weather and worse people. You wouldn’t be able to set foot outside Pyke without fear of being snatched up for a salt wife.”

“A what?”

“It’s...never mind. You don't want to come with me, Jeyne.”

Jeyne’s fingers curled tightly around the kerchief balled in her hands. “You mean _you_ don't want me to come with you.”

“That’s not it. I…” Theon blinked up into the rain, as if he might find the clarity he sought there. “It’s nothing to do with what I want.”

Jeyne gave a nod, or perhaps only a jerk of her head, and took her leave of him, heading belowdecks still twisting her kerchief. “Jeyne,” he said. It must have struck her ears as weakly as it did his, for she did not turn.

**Jeyne**

The night after she and Theon had spoken of the future on the deck of the _Starling_ , Jeyne lay awake in her bunk, listening to the rain patter softly onto the deck above and trying to remember the last time she’d seen Sansa. It had been in her room in Maegor’s Holdfast, where they’d been kept for two days during the Lannisters’ coup. Jeyne had spent much of that time weeping, consumed with fear for her father. That fear had not been misplaced, but even so, her hysterics seemed silly to her now. Sometimes she wondered if the gods had heard her crying in Maegor’s and said to one another, _let’s give her something to cry about._

The nights were better than the days. At night, they had huddled together in Sansa’s bed, whispering–– favorite stories, half-remembered poems, anything to quiet their minds enough to sleep. _Tell me,_ Jeyne had said to Sansa on the first night, _what do you want most in the world?_

Sansa closed her eyes, their lashes resting delicately on her cheeks. _I want this all to be over,_ she said. _I want the world turned right side up again. I want Lady to be alive again, and my little brother to walk again._ She opened her eyes and smiled shyly. _And I want to wed Prince Joffrey. I want to be his queen and give him beautiful children._

 _I want that too,_ Jeyne said, _for you._

 _And what else?_ Sansa asked.

_Well, it wouldn’t hurt to make a marriage of my own. Lord Beric, perhaps. Or the Knight of Flowers._

_But Highgarden and Blackhaven are both weeks’ ride from here. However will I see you?_

_Why, you’ll give my lord husband a seat on the Small Council,_ Jeyne said, giggling.

Sansa giggled too. _Will I?_

_Oh, yes. We’ll live in the city, perhaps right here in the Red Keep, and I’ll be your lady-in-waiting. Singers will compete for the privilege of entertaining us. The people will cast flowers at our feet wherever we go. We’ll raise our children together, as close as we are._

When Jeyne thought of Sansa, that was how she thought of her: frozen in time, like a girl made of snow. To Jeyne’s mind, Sansa was still a child, and pure, while Jeyne was a woman soiled. How could she bring herself to stand before her dearest friend, to look her in the eyes, after all that had happened? After all she’d lost––all that had been torn from her? Theon understood, but Sansa couldn’t possibly. Jeyne couldn’t ask her to try. 

The _Starling_ put into port at White Harbor some two or three weeks later. The city had taken a thrashing in the war, and they had to walk to its outskirts before they found a man willing to sell them ten dazed-looking horses for the price of twenty. Tris paid him, grumbling, and their party mounted up and rode for the White Knife.

When they had crossed the river and gained the kingsroad, Jeyne fell in with Theon at the end of the column. They hung back a moment while Tris and his men rode on. “If you don’t want me to come with you,” Jeyne said, “say so now.”

Theon looked northward. If Jeyne took the kingsroad that way, she’d come to Winterfell within a week or so. South meant crossing the Neck and eventually diverting to Seagard. From there, it would be but a few days’ sail to the Iron Islands. “Well, you can hardly ride north unaccompanied,” Theon said, frowning. “You’ll meet bandits, or wolves. You’ll be lucky to reach Winterfell alive.”

“If you don’t want me to come with you,” Jeyne said again, “say so now.”

Theon cut a hard breath through his nose. He looked at Tris and his party, already several strides ahead of them. He looked at Jeyne. “I want you to come with us,” he said, and put his heels into his horse.

 _Us,_ he’d said, not _me._ But it was a start. 

**Theon**

Theon had known that coming home would not be easy, but he had not anticipated the degree to which being back in Westeros––not the isles, not Winterfell or the Dreadfort, just _Westeros_ ––would affect him. Every sound, every smell, every texture sent him pitching backward in time. The lands he traveled with Tris’s party bore the wounds of war, still so fresh that they could not properly be called scars, but Theon barely saw them. Instead he saw himself: as a ten-year-old hostage bound for Winterfell; as a young man riding to war at Robb’s side; as Ramsay’s creature, approaching Moat Cailin on the back of a horse as haggard as he was.

He tried to see instead Asha’s face when he had been flung into the snow before her, revulsion becoming horror becoming pity. He tried to remember the things she had said: _he’s mad. It’s a mercy anywise._ He could not give ground to ghosts, not now, not here, with Asha’s men all around him. _I must be strong,_ he told himself. _I must make them see that I am strong._

They rode hard for days on end, through spring rains so heavy Theon soon forgot what it felt like to be dry. They ate bread and hard cheese and camped by the roadside while Tris’s men stood guard in shifts. Saddle sores sprang up like poppies on Theon’s arse and thighs, and he formed a dismaying mental picture of himself arriving on Pyke bowlegged on top of everything else. 

Such was the nature of his thoughts when they stopped one day, at noon or thereabouts, to rest their horses and distribute the day’s rations in the grass at the edge of a wood. It was a clear day, a rare day, and Theon did not hunger for bread and cheese near so much as the chance to stretch his legs. “I believe I’ll go for a walk,” he said, “lest I forget how.”

Jeyne looked up from her lunch. “I’ll come with you.”

“I don’t need an escort.”

Theon slipped off before Jeyne could press the issue, passing from harsh white daylight into the cool shadows of the wood. “Don’t go too far,” Tris called after him. “We’ll be off soon.”

When Theon was a boy, the wolfswood had seemed a magical place, wholly unlike anything he had known on the Iron Islands. This wood was much like it, with its carpet of leaf litter and tall, closely-crowded trees. How many hours had Theon and Robb spent in the wolfswood together, hunting small game with homemade slingshots, playing at war with tree-branch horses between their legs? Once, when Jon Snow was with them, Theon had shinnied up a tree and waited until his foster brothers were just beneath it to descend on them, bellowing like a beast. Jon nearly soiled his breeches and wouldn’t speak to Theon for weeks, but Robb just laughed and laughed.

The trees were thinly crowned in their spring foliage, but they stood so near one another that Theon could see no daylight save in glimpses. The flecks of light between the leaves reminded him of stars in the night sky. He and Robb were never allowed beyond the walls of Winterfell after dark. The last time Theon had walked in a wood by night, he had been with Kyra, and they had been running, not walking. She had held his hand tightly. He’d had all his fingers then.

It was cold, but they had neither cloaks nor shoes. Twigs and pebbles dug and cut into Theon’s bare feet. Blood seeped between his toes, sticking them together. _I can’t run anymore,_ Kyra said, gasping, gagging. _I can’t. I can’t._

 _You must,_ he said. He should have left her. He couldn’t leave her. She wouldn’t let go of his hand.

“Kyra?” He turned. Where had she gone? A moment ago he couldn’t get rid of the girl, and now she was nowhere to be found. _No matter,_ he thought. He had no time to lose.

He pushed through the trees at a trot, low branches clawing his face. He and Kyra had set out heading westward, following the setting moon, but he could not see the moon now. He didn’t know where he was going. His heartbeat echoed in his head, growing steadily quicker. The wood smelled strongly of decay.

He felt more than heard the presence behind him, just beyond the screen of the trees. _Kyra?_ he tried to ask again, but his mouth had gone dry and try as he might he could not moisten it. He broke into a run, crashing headlong through the trees.

Then his foot caught on something, a rock or root or fallen branch. When he fell, he hit the ground knees-first, splitting his breeches and the skin beneath them. He scrambled to pick himself up, but succeeded only in grinding dirt into his bloodied knees. Terror pierced him like a spear. He could hear something moving through the leaf litter, a hound, a horse. Any moment now Ramsay would ride him down, laughing, and he would say–– 

“Theon?”

At the sound of his name, the world wrenched itself back into order with violent suddenness. Tris peered down at him, his head framed by the shards of light strewn about the canopy. “There you are,” he said, extending a hand to pull Theon to his feet. “We’re all ready to go.”

The rest of their party waited by the roadside, packed up and mounted. When Jeyne saw Theon, she slid down off her horse and bent to examine his knees. “You’re hurt,” she said with a frown of concern. “What happened?”

He wanted to fall sobbing into her arms. He wanted her to hush him and stroke his hair, the way she had when he took ill in Braavos. “Nothing,” he said hoarsely. “I tripped.”

Jeyne helped him clean and wrap his wounds and shortly they were off. Theon rode at the end of the column, hugging his horse’s sides with his bandaged knees. He felt dizzy. _Asha was right,_ he kept thinking. _Gods be good, Asha was right. I_ am _mad._ His missing fingers burned as if freshly flayed. _Perhaps that’s why she wants me home. Perhaps she means to lock me away, to keep me from further tarnishing the Greyjoy name._

__He gave his horse a kick and cantered up the column to Tris’s side. “You mustn’t tell my sister,” Theon said, his voice low and tight._ _

__Tris looked confused. He was good at that, looking confused. He must have had a lot of practice. “Tell her what?”_ _


	10. Seasong

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Theon and Jeyne arrive at Pyke.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **✩✩SUPER FUN EXCITING AUTHOR'S ANNOUNCEMENT READ PLS✩✩**
> 
> Okay guys, confession time: I wrote the first 10 chapters of this fic between June 2016 and March 2017. Those 10 chapters were the product of a great deal of experimentation: cutting, rewriting, jumping around, et cetera. The version of the story that made it onto your computer screens was substantially different from––and better than––the story as I envisioned it in the beginning.
> 
> Anyway, having written and rewritten and extensively edited the first 10 chapters, I decided to go ahead and start posting them here. I thought that in the time it took me to put up those 10 chapters, I'd easily be able to write and rewrite and edit the next 10. Well, reality happened, and I got distracted, and here I am feeling like a dick for starting something I couldn't commit to finishing in a timely manner. Chapter 11 was the only chapter I wrote and posted in 'real time,' without taking time to reflect on it and revise it in the context of the story as a whole, and I realized shortly after I published it that I wasn't happy with it (that being the reason it no longer exists). I felt there was a noticeable downturn in quality compared to the stuff I really sat with before posting it, and I'm just not okay with that. This story is too important to me. If I’m going to do it, I want to do it right.
> 
> So, I'm putting Afterlife on hiatus for now. I'm going to write the second half all as a unit, the way I wrote the first half, so I’ll have the freedom to cut and rewrite and jump around and make it as close to perfect as I can possibly get it. I can't say when this story will come back, but it _will_ come back, and I hope those of you who were enjoying it will still be there when it does. Thank you so much for your kudos and bookmarks and messages of support. They mean the world to me, and they make me want to give you guys my absolute best.
> 
> (P.S. To those of you who left super sweet comments on Chapter 11 before it went bye-bye, know that you're awesome and I've recorded your words to cherish for all time. I'll reward you eventually, I promise.)

**Jeyne**

A plume of seaspray leapt the rail of the _Nemesis_ and hit Jeyne full in the face, making her squawk and splutter. On the upper deck, she could hear men laughing. “Don’t mind the sea, milady,” one of them called down to her. “That’s just her way of welcoming you to the isles.”

Jeyne smiled thinly, wiped the salt water from her eyes, and went belowdecks. The trip across Ironman’s Bay had not been a pleasant one for her. The men of Tris’s party were ironborn, but under Tris’s leadership they had been reasonably well-behaved; the crew of the longship _Nemesis_ , less so. They were not Tris’s men, and they had no cause to treat Jeyne any differently than they would any girl from the green lands. She could not leave her cabin without hearing a gibe or a whistle or someone calling her Theon’s salt wife.

It didn’t help that Theon himself had not shown his face abovedeck since Seagard. He had been in a foul humor ever since the day he’d emerged bleeding from the wood. It was clear to Jeyne that something bad had happened on his walk, but Theon would not say what. She wished she had insisted on accompanying him. 

Now she stood at his cabin door, knocking softly with the back of her hand. “Theon?” No answer was forthcoming. “Theon, we’re about to pass below the castle. Wouldn’t you like to come up and see it?” Still nothing. “I was hoping you might tell me about it.”

She heard the rustle of bedclothes. “Ask Tris.”

“I’m asking you.”

There was a long silence, then more rustling, and the creak of footsteps. When Theon opened his cabin door, the bags under his eyes told Jeyne he hadn’t been sleeping. She reached up to push his hair out of his face. “You’re wet,” he said.

“I know. Let’s go abovedeck, shall we?”

The waves tossed the longship to and fro as it closed in on the islets where the castle stood, and Jeyne tucked her arm through the crook of Theon’s to keep from stumbling. The motion of the ship made her queasy, but she could not let that bother her now. 

The ship threaded its way between the cliffside and the largest islet, where the sea swirled and frothed around clusters of jagged black rocks. High above them loomed a stone bridge, wide enough to darken the deck from stern to bow with its shadow. “Do they all have names of their own?” Jeyne asked, her eyes traveling up the sheer stone face of the big islet.

“Well, that one’s the Great Keep. Then there’s the Kitchen Keep and the Bloody Keep, and farthest out is the Sea Tower.”

“Which one will we stay in?”

“I don’t know. As a boy I had my bedchamber in the Sea Tower, but the last time I was here they put me in the Bloody Keep.”

Jeyne didn’t fancy sleeping anywhere with the word ‘bloody’ in its name. “The Sea Tower sounds rather nicer.”

Theon nodded. “It was.”

“We must ask for rooms there, then.”

She kept him talking all the time they skirted the cliffs, knowing they could both use as much distraction as she could give them. The Iron Islands were not a place Jeyne had ever imagined herself living, and they looked no more hospitable than she had expected. The closer they came to disembarking, the stronger grew the feeling that she did not belong here.

Theon belonged here, though, and she belonged with Theon. She had to hope that would be enough.

The ship drew near a village with a scant handful of longships and fishing boats tied up at its harbor. _Lordsport,_ Jeyne remembered. A small party stood on a vacant dock, and slowly their faces came into focus. Jeyne recognized Theon’s elder sister, with her austere beauty and cap of sleek dark hair. She knew, too, the fair-haired young man beside her, who had been among the ironborn in the Braavosi banker’s escort. At Asha’s other side stood an older man, white-haired and barrel-chested, with a face Jeyne would surely have remembered had she seen it before.

“I know Asha and Qarl,” she said, “but who’s that with them?” 

The corners of Theon’s mouth twitched upward. It was good to see him smile, but it saddened Jeyne to notice how he’d perfected the art of doing it without showing his teeth. “That would be my uncle,” he said, “or close enough as makes no matter. Dagmer Cleftjaw, he’s called.”

“I can see why.”

Theon snorted. “Bet you didn’t expect to see a face uglier than mine before we even made land.”

“Stop it,” Jeyne said. “You’re not ugly, and neither is he. He’s...unique, is all.”

“That’s a kind way to put it.”

“Well, what’s the harm in being kind?”

They were very close to shore now, close enough for Jeyne to see the golden kraken sewn upon the breast of Asha’s tunic. Theon’s face turned a sickly white. He hunched his shoulders and ducked his head. “I should–-I should get my things,” he said suddenly, and turned to go belowdecks.

 _What things?_ Jeyne wondered. Neither of them had more possessions than they could carry in one arm, and what little they had they would surely replace once ashore. She followed him to his cabin and shut the door gently behind her. “Theon,” she said.

He raked his hands through his hair. “I heard you talking with her,” he said. “On the lake in the crofter’s village.” Hurt and anger danced like fire in his eyes. “She wanted me dead.”

Jeyne remembered the crofter’s village, the walk across the ice. She remembered how her tears had warmed her cheeks only briefly before they froze there. “It was Stannis who wanted you dead,” she said, “him and his northmen. Your sister didn’t want to see you suffer.”

“She thinks me mad.”

“She _thought_ you mad. You’ll prove her wrong.” 

“Will I?”

“You had a moment of weakness,” Jeyne said. “That doesn’t make you mad.”

Theon shook his head furiously. “You don’t know what happened.”

“I don’t need to. I know you.”

The ship jarred against the dock and came to a stop, groaning. Jeyne looked at Theon. She wished there were something she could do, some magic word she could speak to make this easy for him––but had she any magic in her, she would surely have used it up long ago. All she could offer him was her hand.

**Theon**

Theon stepped onto the deck of the _Nemesis_ with his hand in Jeyne’s, but it soon slipped free, sweaty as it was. He paused to wipe his palms on his tunic. On the dock, Asha waited, her lips pressed together so tightly that he could barely see them. He thought of the last time they had met at the harbor in Lordsport––how she had lied to him, toyed with him, groped him through his breeches. _If she tries it again,_ he thought, _she’ll be disappointed._

He needn’t have worried. Asha could not have seemed less likely to touch him anywhere, let alone below the belt. As he limped down the gangplank, she looked him in the chin, the ear, the forehead, but never the eye. “Theon,” she said stiffly. “It’s good to have you home.”

“It’s good to be home,” he said just as stiffly.

Tris disembarked then, with a swagger in his step that was almost comical. Qarl rolled his eyes, and Asha glanced sharply at him before greeting her future husband. Meanwhile, Dagmer drew Theon aside. “You’ve brought a girl home,” he said, looking at Jeyne with her wide eyes and wind-tossed hair. 

Theon blinked. “I didn’t bring her. She just...came.”

“With you. She came with you.”

“Well, yes.”

Dagmer let out a loud hooting laugh and clapped Theon on the back so hard it nearly knocked him over. “The Drowned God is good,” he said. “If you’re to her taste, perhaps she’ll come round to mine one o’ these nights.”

At that, Theon’s lips split in a grin, and he found he did not worry what Dagmer would think of his teeth. If anyone might be expected to bear the sight of him without complaint, it was the Cleftjaw.

It was midafternoon when the _Nemesis_ docked in Lordsport, and late evening by the time they arrived at Pyke. Theon asked Asha if he might sleep in his old bedchamber in the Sea Tower, and she didn’t seem to want to speak to him long enough to argue about it. No sooner had he crossed the threshold than he began to wonder if he had made a mistake. The room was comfortable enough, with its bed carved with arched waves and the threadbare cushion in the window seat, but the past hung so thickly in the air that Theon could smell it. It smelled of sun-warmed stone, of bare feet and salt-stiff hair, and of his mother, who had smelled of starched linen and hand cream.

He could not bear it for long. Midnight saw him stealing Jeyne from her bedchamber, as he had once stolen her from another bedchamber in another tower. They went down to the stables, took a horse, and rode through the gates by the thin light of a new moon, Jeyne’s arms wrapped tightly around Theon’s waist.

A strip of pebbled beach lay at the foot of the cliff, tucked away at the end of a narrow path. There they dismounted, took off their shoes, and walked toward the water. The waves rushed up the shore and over Theon’s feet, breathtakingly cold. The wind tugged at his hair and clothes as if to draw him into the sea. 

He shed his tunic and breeches, even his smallclothes, knowing that Jeyne would not see his shame in the dark. He couldn’t even see himself. He only felt the air moving over his skin, making his every hair stand on end. He felt the icy water climbing his body from ankles to knees to waist. In the sea, there was no shame. In the sea he was strong and nothing could hurt him, no more than a man could drive a knife into the heart of the waters.

Jeyne’s cry rang out over the rumble of the waves. “It’s cold!”

Theon turned to see her silhouette wading through the water toward him. He swam to her and kissed her, letting her feel his smile. “Were you expecting bathwater?”

“I don’t know what I was expecting, truth be told. I’ve never been in the sea before.” Jeyne shivered as Theon embraced her. He could feel the goose pimples stippling her skin, and her nipples hard as pearls against his chest. “It reminds me of a song,” she murmured into his hair, “one I loved as a girl. _The Fisherman’s Bride,_ it was called.”

“Sing it for me,” he said.

“I couldn’t.”

He kissed her neck, feeling her pulse against his lips. “You could.”

A moment passed. Then, Jeyne cleared her throat, and in a high, tremulous voice, she sang:

_There once was a fisherman lived by the sea_  
_With naught but his vessel and line_  
_He fell for a merling girl, fairer than fair_  
_With lips that were sweeter than wine_

_‘I’m a man of small means,’ the fisherman said_  
_‘As are most men in these parts_  
_But if you were my wife I’d be truer than true_  
_And love you with all of my heart’_

_Moved by his words, the girl came ashore_  
_And married him that very day_  
_She promised to love him for longer than long_  
_He swore to protect her always_

_But time passed and with it the girl’s taste for land_  
_She longed for the kiss of the waves_  
_She sat home alone feeling lower than low_  
_While the fisherman plied his trade_

_Till one night he came home to find the girl gone_  
_Her clothing cast off by the hearth_  
_She had put on her scales and swum farther than far_  
_For his heart had not been enough_

_Still the fisherman lived in his hut by the sea_  
_And set out each morn on the tide_  
_To drop his line and look harder than hard_  
_For glimpse of his lost merling bride_

“Rather a sad song, isn’t it?” Theon mused, tracing a finger over the knobs of Jeyne’s spine.

“My father used to say it was about human nature,” she said. “How you can’t change a person, much as you might wish to.”

“Did he? Seems to me it’s about a woman’s nature. Fickle creatures, the lot of you.”

Jeyne laughed at that, and Theon kissed her. He kissed her until the warmth of her mouth burned the cold from his body, until he felt so whole that for a moment he believed he could pull her onto the beach and take her beneath the sickle moon. _Theon,_ she would cry, the word sweet as a song on her lips. _Theon._


End file.
